Magic state distillation on logical qubits

Our holiday gift this year from QuEra is magic 🪄https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15165 ("Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation")

We experimentally demonstrate magic state distillation on distance 3 and 5 logical qubits on our newly built Gemini-class neutral atom computer. Magic state distillation is a foundational building block for large-scale quantum computers.

Stabilizer states and Clifford operations are often easy to implement on an error-corrected quantum computer. However, such states can also be efficiently simulated classically, and do not suffice for universal quantum computation.This is where magic states come in. "Magic", which describes how far away a quantum state is from a stabilizer state, is a key resource for performing universal quantum computation and achieving quantum advantage.

Unfortunately, high-quality magic states are one of the most complex things to prepare for large-scale quantum computers.Magic state distillation prepares high-fidelity magic resource states by refining multiple lower-fidelity ones. This has been a well-studied protocol, but until now, logical-level MSD had not been demonstrated.We realized logical-level MSD on a neutral-atom quantum computer using 2D color codes.

For both distance 3 and 5 codes, we demonstrated that the output magic state fidelity surpassed the input.Beyond demonstrating distillation gain, we probed the quadratic error suppression of the MSD process, varying the fidelity of input states and verifying the output improvements experimentally.

Neutral atom platforms offer unique advantages, such as dynamic reconfigurability and parallel control. In this work, we encoded ten distance-3 or five distance-5 logical qubits simultaneously, and leveraged these features for transversal operations.

To the best of our knowledge, this is also the largest color code that has been demonstrated to date.

Our results highlight a key building block for fault-tolerant quantum computing. While progress is exciting, further fidelity improvements are needed to enable multiple distillation rounds and reduce overheads. There is a long road ahead, but this experiment underscores the potential of neutral atoms for advancing universal quantum computation. The evolving landscape of magic state preparation methods also provides ample opportunities for exploration.

This work reflects the efforts of the entire QuEra Computing Inc. team and collaborators at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Special thanks to the theory team: Sunny, Casey, Chen, Harry, and the Gemini experimental team: Pedro, John, Niki, and Sergio.If you’d like to work on similar frontier questions, check out our openings here.