The practical cost of magic state cultivation
Abstract
Magic state cultivation is a promising method for preparing high-fidelity non-Clifford resource states - a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing - with low spacetime overhead. In benchmarking cultivation, existing resource estimates assume access to noiseless transversal measurement of the output magic state to allow for postselection during the final escape stage of the cultivation process. However, such measurements would destroy the magic state and are therefore unavailable during computation. We develop an open-boundary postselection method, Caliper, that uses only nondestructive mid-circuit syndrome information and substantially outperforms existing methods operating under these constraints. In some regimes, our postselection method uniquely recovers the resource efficiency of prior estimates. However, in other cases, we observe a tradeoff. At spacetime costs reported in previous works, the achievable logical error rates can be orders of magnitude higher, and recovering the reported logical error rate requires substantially larger codes and longer escape stages. Our results highlight how practical considerations involving mid-circuit postselection can impact the design and performance of magic state cultivation protocols.
Related
- Exact logical error rates for magic state cultivation
- MagiCFirm: A Runtime for Magic-State Cultivation with Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design
- Diagnosing and Restoring the Degraded Fault Distance of Magic State Cultivation
- Comparing magic state cultivation methods using matrix product states
- Coded Clifford Measurements for Multiqubit Magic-State Cultivation
BibTeX
@misc{mehta2026practical,
title = {{The practical cost of magic state cultivation}},
author = {Rohan Mehta and Varun Menon and Hengyun Zhou and Mikhail D. Lukin and J. Pablo Bonilla Ataides},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.06828},
eprint = {2610.06828},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06828},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The practical cost of magic state cultivation
AU - Rohan Mehta
AU - Varun Menon
AU - Hengyun Zhou
AU - Mikhail D. Lukin
AU - J. Pablo Bonilla Ataides
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.06828
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06828
AB - Magic state cultivation is a promising method for preparing high-fidelity non-Clifford resource states - a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing - with low spacetime overhead. In benchmarking cultivation, existing resource estimates assume access to noiseless transversal measurement of the output magic state to allow for postselection during the final escape stage of the cultivation process. However, such measurements would destroy the magic state and are therefore unavailable during computation. We develop an open-boundary postselection method, Caliper, that uses only nondestructive mid-circuit syndrome information and substantially outperforms existing methods operating under these constraints. In some regimes, our postselection method uniquely recovers the resource efficiency of prior estimates. However, in other cases, we observe a tradeoff. At spacetime costs reported in previous works, the achievable logical error rates can be orders of magnitude higher, and recovering the reported logical error rate requires substantially larger codes and longer escape stages. Our results highlight how practical considerations involving mid-circuit postselection can impact the design and performance of magic state cultivation protocols.
ER -