Magic States. - Nathan Babcock

The Gottesman-Knill theorem states that quantum computations consisting only of preparations of the |0> state, unitary operations from the Clifford group, and Pauli measurements can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer and are therefore not sufficient to do universal quantum computation (UQC). Recently, Bravyi and Kitaev proposed a novel scheme for UQC based on a modification to the Clifford group model (quant-ph/0403025). They show that known quantum error correction algorithms will distill certain "magic" mixed states into pure states allowing UQC. I will provide a brief review of quantum error correction and the "stabilizer" formalism before giving a detailed explanation of the distillation algorithm. Finally, I will discuss a "proof-of-concept" implementation of the algorithm on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer.