Unfolded distillation: very low-cost magic state preparation for biased-noise qubits
arXiv:2507.12511 · doi:10.1038/s41534-026-01197-z
Abstract
Magic state distillation enables universal fault-tolerant quantum computation by implementing non-Clifford gates via the preparation of high-fidelity magic states. However, it comes at the cost of substantial logical-level overhead in both space and time. In this work, we propose a very low-cost magic state distillation scheme for biased-noise qubits. By leveraging the noise bias, our scheme enables the preparation of a magic state with a logical error rate of , using only 53 qubits and 5.5 error correction rounds, under a noise bias of and a phase-flip noise rate of . This reduces the circuit volume by more than one order of magnitude relative to magic state cultivation for unbiased-noise qubits and by more than two orders of magnitude relative to standard magic state distillation. Moreover, our scheme provides three key advantages over previous proposals for biased-noise qubits. First, it only requires nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates on a 2D lattice. Second, the logical fidelity remains nearly identical even at a more modest noise bias of , at the cost of a slightly increased circuit volume. Third, the scheme remains effective even at high physical phase-flip rates, in contrast to previously proposed approaches whose circuit volume grows exponentially with the error rate. Our construction is based on unfolding the stabilizer group of the Hadamard 3D quantum Reed-Muller code in 2D, enabling distillation at the physical level rather than the logical level, and is therefore referred to as distillation.
21 pages, 17 figures, 1 table
References in corpus (7)
- Surface codes: Towards practical large-scale quantum computation
- Topological Quantum Distillation
- Restrictions on Transversal Encoded Quantum Gate Sets
- Quantum circuits of T-depth one
- Fault-tolerant quantum computation against biased noise
- A magic state's fidelity can be superior to the operations that created it
- Efficient one- and two-qubit pulsed gates for an oscillator stabilized Josephson qubit