Contextual bound states for qudit magic state distillation

Abstract

Identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for universal quantum computing is a long-standing open problem for which contextuality is, perhaps, the only promising solution [Howard et al., Nature 510, 351 (2014)]. To justify this conjecture, Howard et al. showed that contextuality is equivalent to Wigner negativity for qudits, and is therefore necessary and possibly sufficient for qudit magic state distillation. Here, we reformulate magic state distillation in the language of discrete phase space, to show that any finite qudit magic state distillation routine contains bound states outside the Wigner polytope -- these states exhibit contextuality but are useless for magic state distillation.