Experimental demonstration of logical magic state distillation

The realization of a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer is a longstanding goal of the quantum information science field. Quantum error correcting codes encode logical information with the ability to correct errors that occur during circuit execution. Since the set of logical operations that can be easily implemented is limited, we require ‘magic states’ to implement universal computation. A key approach to realizing high fidelity magic states is so-called ‘magic state distillation’. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate logical magic state distillation for the first time. We encode logical magic states in distance-3 and distance-5 color codes. Subsequently, we improve the logical fidelity of these magic states by implementing a 5-to-1 distillation circuit. These results demonstrate a core building block for large-scale universal quantum computers.