Low Overhead Qutrit Magic State Distillation

Shiroman Prakash1 and Tanay Saha1,2

1Department of Physics and Computer Science, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra-282005, India
2Present Address: Department of Mathematics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada

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Abstract

We show that using qutrits rather than qubits leads to a substantial reduction in the overhead cost associated with an approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing known as magic state distillation. We construct a family of $[[9m-k, k, 2]]_3$ triorthogonal qutrit error-correcting codes for any positive integers $m$ and $k$ with $k \leq 3m-2$ that are suitable for magic state distillation. In magic state distillation, the number of ancillae required to produce a magic state with target error rate $\epsilon$ is $O(\log^\gamma \epsilon^{-1})$, where the yield parameter $\gamma$ characterizes the overhead cost. For $k=3m-2$, our codes have $\gamma = \log_2 (2+\frac{6}{3 m-2})$, which tends to $1$ as $m \to \infty$. Moreover, the $[[20,7,2]]_3$ qutrit code that arises from our construction when $m=3$ already has a yield parameter of $1.51$ which outperforms all known qubit triorthogonal codes of size less than a few hundred qubits.

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Cited by

[1] Tanay Saha and Shiroman Prakash, "Sublogarithmic distillation in all prime dimensions using punctured Reed-Muller codes", Physical Review A 113 4, 042405 (2026).

[2] Sarah Meng Li, Michele Mosca, Neil J. Ross, John van de Wetering, and Yuming Zhao, "A Complete and Natural Rule Set for Multi-Qutrit Clifford Circuits", Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 426, 23 (2025).

[3] Shiroman Prakash and Rishabh Singhal, "Search for high-threshold qutrit magic-state distillation routines", Physical Review A 113 4, 042404 (2026).

[4] Amolak Ratan Kalra, Michele Mosca, and Dinesh Valluri, "Synthesis and Arithmetic of Single Qutrit Circuits", Quantum 9, 1647 (2025).

[5] Amolak Ratan Kalra and Shiroman Prakash, "Invariant Theory, Magic State Distillation, and Bounds on Classical Codes", arXiv:2501.10163, (2025).

[6] Sarah Meng Li, Michele Mosca, Neil J. Ross, John van de Wetering, and Yuming Zhao, "A Complete and Natural Rule Set for Multi-Qutrit Clifford Circuits", arXiv:2508.14670, (2025).

[7] Victor V. Albert and Philippe Faist, "Handbook of Error-Correcting Codes", arXiv:2606.11484, (2026).

[8] Michael J. Cervia, Henry Lamm, Diyi Liu, Edison M. Murairi, and Shuchen Zhu, "Magic State Distillation using Asymptotically Good Codes on Qudits", arXiv:2512.21874, (2025).

[9] Michael Zurel, Santanil Jana, and Nadish de Silva, "High-threshold magic state distillation with quantum quadratic residue codes", arXiv:2603.18560, (2026).

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