Pre-distillation of magic states via composite schemes
Phys. Rev. A 114, 022415 – Published 10 August, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ngrr-863r
Abstract
Magic state distillation (MSD) is a cornerstone of fault-tolerant quantum computing, enabling non-Clifford gates via state injection into stabilizer circuits. However, the substantial overhead of current MSD protocols remains a major obstacle to scalable implementations. We propose a general framework for pre-distillation based on composite pulse sequences that suppress systematic errors in the generation of magic states. While most composite designs target simple gates such as , or Hadamard, our schemes directly implement the non-Clifford gate with enhanced robustness to the targeted systematic errors. We develop composite sequences tailored to the dominant control imperfections in superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and integrated photonic platforms. To quantify improvement in the implementation, we introduce an operationally motivated fidelity measure specifically tailored to the gate, which captures the gate's effectiveness in preparing high-fidelity magic states. We further show that the error in the channel arising from the injection of faulty magic states scales linearly with the leading-order error of the states. Within the systematic-error-dominated regimes considered, this approach lowers the number of required distillation levels by up to three across the platforms we study, translating to substantial qubit-overhead savings and offering a practical route toward more resource-efficient universal quantum computation.
