Application of a Resource Theory for Magic States to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Motivated by their necessity for most fault-tolerant quantum computation schemes, we formulate a resource theory for magic states. First, we show that robustness of magic is a well-behaved magic monotone that operationally quantifies the classical simulation overhead for a Gottesman-Knill-type scheme using ancillary magic states. Our framework subsequently finds immediate application in the task of synthesizing non-Clifford gates using magic states. When magic states are interspersed with Clifford gates, Pauli measurements, and stabilizer ancillas—the most general synthesis scenario—then the class of synthesizable unitaries is hard to characterize. Our techniques can place nontrivial lower bounds on the number of magic states required for implementing a given target unitary. Guided by these results, we have found new and optimal examples of such synthesis

Fault-tolerant protection of near-term trapped-ion topological qubits under realistic noise sources

The quest of demonstrating beneficial quantum error correction in near-term noisy quantum processors can benefit enormously from a low-resource optimization of fault-tolerant schemes, which are specially designed for a particular platform considering both state-of-the-art technological capabilities and main sources of noise. In this work, we show that flag-qubit-based fault-tolerant techniques for active error detection and correction, as well as for encoding of logical qubits, can be leveraged in current designs of trapped-ion quantum processors to achieve this break-even point of beneficial quantum error correction. Our improved description of the relevant sources of noise, together with detailed schedules for the implementation of these flag-based protocols, provide one of the most complete microscopic characterizations of a fault-tolerant quantum processor to date. By extensive numerical simulations, we provide a comparative study of flag- and cat-based approaches to quantum error correction, and show that the superior performance of the former can become a landmark in the success of near-term quantum computing with noisy trapped-ion devices.Comment: new version, accepted in Phys. Rev.

An efficient magic state approach to small angle rotations

Standard error correction techniques only provide a quantum memory and need extra gadgets to perform computation. Central to quantum algorithms are small angle rotations, which can be fault-tolerantly implemented given a supply of an unconventional species of magic state. We present a low-cost distillation routine for preparing these small angle magic states. Our protocol builds on the work of Duclos-Cianci and Poulin [Phys. Rev. A, 91, 042315 (2015)] by compressing their circuit. Additionally, we present a method of diluting magic states that reduces costs associated with very small angle rotations. We quantify performance by the expected number of noisy magic states consumed per rotation, and compare with other protocols. For modest size angles, our protocols offer a factor 24 improvement over the best known gate synthesis protocols and a factor 2 over the Duclos-Cianci and Poulin protocol. For very small angle rotations, the dilution protocol dramatically reduces costs, giving several orders magnitude improvement over competitors. There also exists an intermediary regime of small, but not very small, angles where our approach gives a marginal improvement over gate synthesis. We discuss how different performance metrics may alter these conclusions