Magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor

Authors:Emma Rosenfeld, Craig Gidney, Gabrielle Roberts, Alexis Morvan, Nathan Lacroix, Dvir Kafri, Jeffrey Marshall, Ming Li, Volodymyr Sivak, Dmitry Abanin, Amira Abbas, Rajeev Acharya, Laleh Aghababaie Beni, Georg Aigeldinger, Ross Alcaraz, Sayra Alcaraz, Trond I. Andersen, Markus Ansmann, Frank Arute, Kunal Arya, Walt Askew, Nikita Astrakhantsev, Juan Atalaya, Ryan Babbush, Brian Ballard, Joseph C. Bardin, Hector Bates, Andreas Bengtsson, Majid Bigdeli Karimi, Alexander Bilmes, Simon Bilodeau, Felix Borjans, Jenna Bovaird, Dylan Bowers, Leon Brill, Peter Brooks, Michael Broughton, David A. Browne, Brett Buchea, Bob B. Buckley, Tim Burger, Brian Burkett, Nicholas Bushnell, Jamal Busnaina, Anthony Cabrera, Juan Campero, Hung-Shen Chang, Silas Chen, Zijun Chen, Ben Chiaro, Liang-Ying Chih, Agnetta Y. Cleland, Bryan Cochrane, Matt Cockrell, Josh Cogan, Paul Conner, Harold Cook, Rodrigo G. Cortiñas, William Courtney, Alexander L. Crook, Ben Curtin, Martin Damyanov, Sayan Das, Dripto M. Debroy, Sean Demura, Paul Donohoe, Ilya Drozdov, Andrew Dunsworth, Valerie Ehimhen, Alec Eickbusch, Aviv Moshe Elbag, Lior Ella, Mahmoud Elzouka, David Enriquez, Catherine Erickson, Lara Faoro, Vinicius S. Ferreira, Marcos Flores, Leslie Flores Burgos, Sam Fontes, Ebrahim Forati, Jeremiah Ford, Brooks Foxen, Masaya Fukami, Alan Wing Lun Fung, Lenny Fuste, Suhas Ganjam, Gonzalo Garcia, Christopher Garrick, Robert Gasca, Helge Gehring, Robert Geiger, Élie Genois, William Giang, Dar Gilboa, James E. Goeders, Edward C. Gonzales, Raja Gosula, Stijn J. de Graaf, Alejandro Grajales Dau et al. (195 additional authors not shown) View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires a universal gate set, but the necessary non-Clifford gates represent a significant resource cost for most quantum error correction architectures. Magic state cultivation offers an efficient alternative to resource-intensive distillation protocols; however, testing the proposal's assumptions represents a challenging departure from quantum memory experiments. We present an experimental study of magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum processor. We implement cultivation, including code-switching into a surface code, and develop a fault-tolerant measurement protocol to bound the magic state fidelity. Cultivation reduces the error by a factor of 40, with a state fidelity of 0.9999(1) (retaining 8% of attempts). Our results experimentally establish magic state cultivation as a viable solution to one of quantum computing's most significant challenges. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2512.13908 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2512.13908v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.13908 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Emma Rosenfeld [view email] [v1] Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:29:40 UTC (3,549 KB)