English

Simulating magic state cultivation with few Clifford terms

Quantum Physics 2026-04-03 v7

Abstract

Building upon [arXiv:2509.01224], we present a few methods on how to simulate the non-Clifford d=5d=5 magic state cultivation circuits [arXiv:2409.17595] with a sum of 8\approx 8 Clifford ZX-diagrams on average, at 0.1%0.1\% noise. Compared to a magic cat state stabiliser decomposition of all 5353 non-Clifford spiders (6,377,2926{,}377{,}292 terms required), this is more than 7×1057 \times 10^{5} times reduction in the number of terms. Our stabiliser decomposition has the advantage of representing the final non-Clifford state (in light of circuit errors) as a sum of Clifford ZX-diagrams. This will be useful in simulating the escape stage of magic state cultivation, where one needs to port the resultant state of cultivation into a larger Clifford circuit with many more qubits. Still, it's necessary to only track 8\approx 8 Clifford terms. Our result sheds light on the simulability of operationally relevant, high TT-count quantum circuits with some internal structure. Finally, we provide numerical results for full non-Clifford stabiliser rank simulation based on tsim\mathtt{tsim} along with optimisations using our cutting decompositions. Nearly 4×1064\times 10^{6} shots per second can be obtained on a laptop for the smaller d=3d = 3 circuits at SD6 circuit level noise p=0.0005p=0.0005, making it only \sim1.11.1 times slower than its (circuit-unspecific and un-optimised) fully Clifford proxy simulation via stim\mathtt{stim} using SS gates.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.08658,
  title  = {Simulating magic state cultivation with few Clifford terms},
  author = {Kwok Ho Wan and Zhenghao Zhong and Ainhoa Zapirain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08658},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

v7-updated references and additional author added

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:30:13.462Z