Transversal injection for direct encoding of ancilla states for non-Clifford gates using stabilizer codes

Abstract

Fault-tolerant, error-corrected quantum computation is commonly acknowledged to be crucial to the realization of large-scale quantum algorithms that could lead to extremely impactful scientific or commercial results. Achieving a universal set of quantum gate operations in a fault-tolerant, error-corrected framework suffers from a conservation of unpleasantness. In general, no matter what error-correction technique is employed, there is always one element of a universal gate set that carries a significant resource overhead—either in physical qubits, computational time, or both. Specifically, this is due to the application of non-Clifford gates. A common method for realizing these gates for stabilizer codes such as the surface code is a combination of three protocols: state injection, distillation, and gate teleportation. These protocols contribute to the resource overhead compared with logical operations such as a CNOT gate and contribute to the qubit resources for any error-corrected quantum algorithm. In this paper, we introduce a very simple protocol to potentially reduce this overhead for non-Clifford gates: transversal injection. Transversal injection modifies the initial physical states of all data qubits in a stabilizer code before standard encoding and results in the direct preparation of a large class of single qubit states, including resource states for non-Clifford logic gates. Preliminary results hint at high-quality fidelities at larger distances and motivate further research on this technique.