Matrix-product states simulate a 15-to-1 distillation circuit in under 40 seconds
By Christian Stark · · preprint
A matrix-product-state simulator ran a 15-to-1 magic state distillation circuit with hundreds of error-correction rounds using 11 logical qubits and 187 physical qubits, at a maximal bond dimension of 64, in under 40 seconds, alongside rotated surface code memory to distance 11 and logical Bell-state preparation to distance 9. The authors attribute several orders of magnitude of that gain to implementation choices rather than to the method, which is the useful part: the cost of simulating these circuits is not fixed, and published resource estimates inherit whatever assumption was made about it. None of this ran on hardware. It is a classical simulation of the circuits a fault-tolerant machine would have to execute, so it constrains resource estimates rather than saying anything about a device.
The numbers
- 15-to-1 magic state distillation with hundreds of QEC rounds, simulated on 11 logical qubits (187 physical qubits) at maximal bond dimension 64, in under 40 seconds
- Rotated surface code memory simulated up to distance 11
- Logical Bell-state preparation simulated up to distance 9
- Bond dimensions and simulation time reduced by several orders of magnitude against a naive implementation
What it does not show
- Classical simulation throughout. No part of this ran on quantum hardware.
- The speed comes from implementation choices the authors optimised, not from the method alone; a naive matrix-product-state implementation is reported orders of magnitude slower.
- The authors position the method as a complement to near-Clifford simulators, not a replacement for them.
Primary source
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