Quantum computation with realistic magic state factories

Abstract

Leading approaches to fault-tolerant quantum computation dedicate a significant portion of the hardware to computational factories that churn out high-fidelity ancillas called magic states. Consequently, efficient and realistic factory design is of paramount importance. Here we present the most detailed resource assessment to date of magic state factories within a surface code quantum computer, along the way introducing a number of new techniques. We show that the block codes of Bravyi and Haah [Phys. Rev. A 86, 052329 (2012)] have been systematically undervalued; we track correlated errors both numerically and analytically, providing fidelity estimates without appeal to the union bound. We also introduce a subsystem code realisation of these protocols with constant time and low ancilla cost. Additionally, we confirm that magic state factories have space-time costs that scale as a constant factor of surface code costs. We find that the magic state factory required for post-classical factoring can be as small as 6.3 million data qubits, ignoring ancilla qubits, assuming $10^{-4}$ error gates, and the availability of long range interactions.