Fault-tolerant magic state preparation with flag qubits

Abstract: Magic state distillation is one of the leading candidates for implementing universal fault-tolerant logical gates. However, the distillation circuits themselves are not fault-tolerant, so there is additional cost to first implement encoded Clifford gates with negligible error. In this paper we present a scheme to fault-tolerantly and directly prepare magic states using flag qubits. One of these schemes uses a single extra ancilla, even with noisy Clifford gates. We compare the physical qubit and gate cost of this scheme to the magic state distillation protocol of Meier, Eastin, and Knill, which is efficient and uses a small stabilizer circuit. In some regimes, we show that the overhead can be improved by several orders of magnitude.