Magic State Distillation via Codes over Binary Extension Fields

Abstract

Fault-tolerant quantum computation architectures are frequently bottlenecked by the overhead of producing high-fidelity magic states. In this work, we use algebraic geometric techniques to construct codes over binary extension fields $\mathbb{F}_{2^s}$, thus discovering new protocols for the distillation of qubit magic states, where our focus is on the regime of practical qubit-based quantum computing architectures. To do this, we show that multi-qubit gates of interest such as $\text{CS}$, $\text{CCZ}$, and $\text{TOF}\# = \text{CCZ}_{123}\text{CCZ}_{345}$, can be packaged into simple gates over the larger fields, and we derive simple algebraic conditions in the extension fields allowing the distillation of these gates. Because they are derived from Galois qudits, the corresponding qubits codes naturally handle the correlated errors present on such multi-qubit states. Moreover, the protocols we discover are extremely compact; for example, we show that 4 $\text{CS}$ states can be distilled to 1 $\text{CS}$ state at distance 2, using only 4 logical qubits. For a case study, we consider the distillation of $\text{CS}$ and $\text{CCZ}$ states from injected $\text{T}$ and $\text{CS}$ states. When optimized for magic state production per unit time, or logical spacetime volume, we find that our protocols outperform the state-of-the-art in almost every situation, both at input error rates $10^{-3}$ (direct injection), and $10^{-6}$ (allowing some cultivation pre-injection).