The limits of magic-state distillation

Abstract

Magic-state factories are a major cost of fault-tolerant quantum computing, yet how few noisy inputs they need is known only for restricted protocols. We show that, for tolerating input faults, any stabilizer protocol, however adaptive, postselected or multistage, is no better than a projection onto one stabilizer code, and that for rational targets a fault pattern is harmful exactly when its complement is. Searches over all codes show that quadratic distillation of one T state needs exactly nine inputs and that the eight-input CCZ factory is optimal. At order $d$, one T state needs $n\ge 2d$.

arXiv comment5 pages, 10 pages of Supplemental Material, 1 figure, 3 tables