Scalable measures of magic resource for quantum computers

Abstract

Non-stabilizerness or magic resource characterizes the amount of non-Clifford operations needed to prepare quantum states. It is a crucial resource for quantum computing and a necessary condition for quantum advantage. However, quantifying magic resource beyond a few qubits has been a major challenge. Here, we introduce efficient measures of magic resource for pure quantum states with a sampling cost that is independent of the number of qubits. Our method uses Bell measurements over two copies of a state, which we implement in experiment together with a cost-free error mitigation scheme. We show the transition of classically simulable stabilizer states into intractable quantum states on the IonQ quantum computer. For applications, we efficiently distinguish stabilizer and non-stabilizer states with low measurement cost even in the presence of experimental noise. Further, we propose a variational quantum algorithm to maximize our measure via the shift-rule. Our algorithm can be free of barren plateaus even for highly expressible variational circuits. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate a Bell measurement protocol for the stabilizer R\'enyi entropy as well as the Wallach-Meyer entanglement measure. Our results pave the way to understand the non-classical power of quantum computers, quantum simulators and quantum many-body systems.