On the Power of Reusable Magic States

Abstract: In this paper we study reusable magic states. These states are a special subset of the standard magic states. Once distilled, reusable magic states can be used, repeatedly, to apply some unitary U. Given this property, reusable magic states have the potential to greatly lower qubit and gate overheads in fault-tolerant quantum computation. While these states are promising, we provide a strong argument for their limited computational power. Specifically, we show that if reusable magic states can be used to apply non-Clifford unitaries, then we can exploit them to efficiently simulate poly-sized quantum circuits on a classical computer.