Magic State Distillation: Not as Costly as You Think

Abstract: Despite significant overhead reductions since its first proposal, magic state distillation is often considered to be a very costly procedure that dominates the resource cost of fault-tolerant quantum computers. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that this is not true. By writing distillation circuits in a form that separates qubits that are capable of error detection from those that are not, most logical qubits used for distillation can be encoded at a very low code distance. This significantly reduces the space-time cost of distillation, as well as the number of qubits. In extreme cases, it can cost less to distill a magic state than to perform a logical Clifford gate on full-distance logical qubits.