Pre-Distillation of Magic States via Composite Schemes

Abstract: Magic state distillation (MSD) is a cornerstone of fault-tolerant quantum computing, enabling non-Clifford gates via state injection into stabilizer circuits. However, the substantial overhead of current MSD protocols remains a major obstacle to scalable implementations. We propose a general framework for pre-distillation, based on composite pulse sequences that suppress systematic errors in the generation of magic states. Unlike typical composite designs that target simple gates such as $X$, $Z$, or Hadamard, our schemes directly implement the non-Clifford $\mathcal{T}$ gate with enhanced robustness. We develop composite sequences tailored to the dominant control imperfections in superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and integrated photonic platforms. To quantify improvement in the implementation, we introduce an operationally motivated fidelity measure specifically tailored to the $\mathcal{T}$ gate: the T-magic error, which captures the gate's effectiveness in preparing high-fidelity magic states. We further show that the error in the channel arising from the injection of faulty magic states scales linearly with the leading-order error of the states. Across all platforms, our approach yields high-fidelity $\mathcal{T}$ gates with reduced noise, lowering the number of distillation levels by up to three. This translates to exponential savings in qubit overhead and offers a practical path toward more resource-efficient universal quantum computation.