Papers › Magic state cultivation: growing T states as cheap as CNOT gates
Magic state cultivation: growing T states as cheap as CNOT gates
Craig Gidney, Noah Shutty, Cody Jones
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We refine ideas from Knill 1996, Jones 2016, Chamberland 2020, Gidney 2023+2024, Bombin 2024, and Hirano 2024 to efficiently prepare good |T⟩ states. We call our construction "magic state cultivation" because it gradually grows the size and reliability of one state. Cultivation fits inside a surface code patch and uses roughly the same number of physical gates as a lattice surgery CNOT gate of equivalent reliability. We estimate the infidelity of cultivation (from injection to idling at distance 15) using a mix of state vector simulation, stabilizer simulation, error enumeration, and Monte Carlo sampling. Compared to prior work, cultivation uses an order of magnitude fewer qubit-rounds to reach logical error rates as low as 2 ·10⁻⁹ when subjected to 10⁻³ uniform depolarizing circuit noise. Halving the circuit noise to 5 ·10⁻⁴ improves the achievable logical error rate to 4 ·10⁻¹¹. Cultivation's efficiency and strong response to improvements in physical noise suggest that further magic state distillation may never be needed in practice.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections