Magic-Free Certification of Logical Error Rates in Universal Fault-Tolerant Circuits
Abstract
As quantum hardware enters the fault-tolerant regime, algorithms are beginning to be executed on encoded qubits, yet scalable certification of how well they run remains an open problem. Here we introduce magic-free certification, a certification protocol for universal fault-tolerant circuits that consumes no magic, the resource that generally places them beyond efficient classical simulation and is by far the most expensive element of a fault-tolerant computation. The protocol is code- and decoder-agnostic, runs interleaved with the target circuit on the same device, and has a sample complexity that grows linearly with the number of logical qubits and non-Clifford gates while remaining decoupled from the logical error rate itself. Given a predefined error tolerance pL*, the protocol determines at a chosen confidence level whether the device executes the target circuit at a logical error rate below pL*. The method relies on trap circuits, copies of the target with every magic state replaced by a stabilizer state, whose outcomes are deterministic and which, being indistinguishable from the target to stochastic Pauli noise, fail at the same rate. We illustrate the protocol in Steane-code simulations of a magic state injection gadget and a quantum Fourier transform.
Related
- Fast verification of fault tolerant magic state preparation circuits with the CNOT + T gate set
- Fault-tolerant and fully addressable unitary logical gates via round-robin sparsification
- Exact logical error rates for magic state cultivation
- Efficiently estimating failure rates of fault-tolerant logical non-Clifford blocks
- Planar fault-tolerant logical measurements with low qubit overhead
BibTeX
@misc{miguel2026magicfree,
title = {{Magic-Free Certification of Logical Error Rates in Universal Fault-Tolerant Circuits}},
author = {Gebrat Porta-San Miguel and Shahram Panahiyan and Dieter Jaksch},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.16401},
eprint = {2610.16401},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16401},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Magic-Free Certification of Logical Error Rates in Universal Fault-Tolerant Circuits
AU - Gebrat Porta-San Miguel
AU - Shahram Panahiyan
AU - Dieter Jaksch
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.16401
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16401
AB - As quantum hardware enters the fault-tolerant regime, algorithms are beginning to be executed on encoded qubits, yet scalable certification of how well they run remains an open problem. Here we introduce magic-free certification, a certification protocol for universal fault-tolerant circuits that consumes no magic, the resource that generally places them beyond efficient classical simulation and is by far the most expensive element of a fault-tolerant computation. The protocol is code- and decoder-agnostic, runs interleaved with the target circuit on the same device, and has a sample complexity that grows linearly with the number of logical qubits and non-Clifford gates while remaining decoupled from the logical error rate itself. Given a predefined error tolerance p_L^*, the protocol determines at a chosen confidence level whether the device executes the target circuit at a logical error rate below p_L^*. The method relies on trap circuits, copies of the target with every magic state replaced by a stabilizer state, whose outcomes are deterministic and which, being indistinguishable from the target to stochastic Pauli noise, fail at the same rate. We illustrate the protocol in Steane-code simulations of a magic state injection gadget and a quantum Fourier transform.
ER -