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Magic state distillation with noisy Clifford gates

Peter Brooks, California Institute of Technology

(Session 7b : Friday from 5:00 - 5:30)

Abstract. A promising method for achieving universal fault-tolerant quantum computation is to supplement Clifford operations, which are sufficient for error correction but not a universal basis, with copies of certain single-qubit states called magic states. High-fidelity copies of these states can be prepared from noisy copies using state distillation protocols which use only Clifford gates. This process can proceed to arbitrarily high fidelity, assuming that the Clifford gates are perfect. In practice, imperfect Clifford operations will both reduce the efficiency of distillation and limit the achievable fidelity of the distilled state. This will be particularly relevant to quantum computation where the noise from Clifford operations is substantial, which will likely be the case with early demonstrations of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Recently, a number of interesting proposals have been made for more efficient state distillation protocols which use fewer ancillas to achieve a given error rate. We analyze and compare the efficiency and success probability for magic state distillation under these various proposals, taking into account the presence of imperfect Clifford operations.