Magna: simulating magic state factories as cheaply as Clifford circuits
Magna: simulating magic state factories as cheaply as Clifford circuits
Yifei Wang, Yingfei Gu
AbstractClassical simulation of magic state factories, including distillation, cultivation, and code switching, is challenging because of their substantial non-Clifford content. We introduce $\texttt{magna}$ (magic-state-factory assessment via global network algebra), a classical simulator that simulates such protocols as cheaply as Clifford circuits. $\texttt{magna}$ expresses the figures of merit of a protocol, namely the acceptance rate and the fidelity of the accepted states, as tensor networks, which it reduces globally by exploiting a structural correspondence with transversal gates on quantum codes. $\texttt{magna}$ further supports feedforward conditioned on arbitrary functions of mid-circuit measurement outcomes, including decoder outputs. We simulate Bravyi--Haah distillation with up to 100 output magic states at a cost that does not grow exponentially in the number of outputs, and achieve state-of-the-art sampling times for distance-5 magic state cultivation on both color codes and RP$^2$ surface codes. Finally, we validate nonlinear feedforward on a logical-level distillation protocol with 15 rounds of decoder-dependent feedforward. $\texttt{magna}$ aims to contribute to the key infrastructure for the large-scale evaluation and optimization of magic state factories.