Unfolded distillation: very low-cost magic state preparation for biased-noise qubits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, bias-exploiting magic state distillation scheme for biased-noise qubits, significantly reducing resource overhead and maintaining high fidelity even at moderate noise biases and error rates.

Contribution

It proposes the unfolded distillation method that enables physical-level magic state preparation with minimal overhead, leveraging noise bias and 2D nearest-neighbor gates.

Findings

Achieves logical error rate of 3×10⁻⁷ with 53 qubits and 5.5 error correction rounds.

Reduces circuit volume by over an order of magnitude compared to unbiased distillation.

Effective even at high physical phase-flip error rates and moderate noise bias.

Abstract

Magic state distillation enables universal fault-tolerant quantum computation by implementing non-Clifford gates via the preparation of high-fidelity magic states. However, it comes at the cost of substantial logical-level overhead in both space and time. In this work, we propose a very low-cost magic state distillation scheme for biased-noise qubits. By leveraging the noise bias, our scheme enables the preparation of a magic state with a logical error rate of $3 \times 10^{-7}$, using only 53 qubits and 5.5 error correction rounds, under a noise bias of $\eta \gtrsim 5 \times 10^6$ and a phase-flip noise rate of $0.1\%$. This reduces the circuit volume by more than one order of magnitude relative to magic state cultivation for unbiased-noise qubits and by more than two orders of magnitude relative to standard magic state distillation. Moreover, our scheme provides three key advantages over previous proposals for biased-noise qubits. First, it only requires nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates on a 2D lattice. Second, the logical fidelity remains nearly identical even at a more modest noise bias of $\eta \gtrsim 80$, at the cost of a slightly increased circuit volume. Third, the scheme remains effective even at high physical phase-flip rates, in contrast to previously proposed approaches whose circuit volume grows exponentially with the error rate. Our construction is based on unfolding the $X$ stabilizer group of the Hadamard 3D quantum Reed-Muller code in 2D, enabling distillation at the physical level rather than the logical level, and is therefore referred to as $\textit{unfolded}$ distillation.