Experimental demonstration of logical magic state distillation

Abstract

Realizing universal fault-tolerant quantum computation is a key goal in quantum information science^1-4. By encoding quantum information into logical qubits using quantum error correcting codes, physical errors can be detected and corrected, enabling a substantial reduction in logical error rates^5-11. However, the set of logical operations that can be easily implemented on these encoded qubits is often constrained^1,12, necessitating the use of special resource states known as 'magic states'¹³ to implement universal, classically hard circuits¹⁴. A key method to prepare high-fidelity magic states is to perform 'distillation', creating them from multiple lower-fidelity inputs^13,15. Here we present the experimental realization of magic state distillation with logical qubits on a neutral-atom quantum computer. Our approach uses a dynamically reconfigurable architecture^8,16 to encode and perform quantum operations on many logical qubits in parallel. We demonstrate the distillation of magic states encoded in d = 3 and d = 5 colour codes, observing improvements in the logical fidelity of the output magic states compared with the input logical magic states. These experiments demonstrate a key building block of universal fault-tolerant quantum computation and represent an important step towards large-scale logical quantum processors.