Google team demonstrates magic state cultivation on a superconducting quantum chip

Researchers report an experimental implementation of magic state cultivation, a method for producing the non-Clifford resource needed for universal fault-tolerant quantum computing. The approach was tested on a superconducting quantum processor and included switching the encoding into a surface code. A fault-tolerant measurement protocol was used to bound the fidelity of the resulting magic states. The team reports a 40-fold reduction in error, reaching a fidelity of at least 0.9999 while keeping about 8% of attempts. The findings, published in Science, are presented as experimental support for cultivation as a practical alternative to costly distillation protocols.