Stabiliser operations occupy a prominent role in the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computing. They are defined operationally: by the use of Clifford gates, Pauli measurements and classical control. Within the stabiliser formalism, these operations can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer, a result which is known as the Gottesman-Knill theorem. However, an additional supply of magic states is enough to promote them to a universal, fault-tolerant model for quantum computing. To quantify the needed resources in terms of magic states, a resource theory of magic has been developed during the last years. Stabiliser operations (SO) are considered free within this theory, however they are not the most general class of free operations. From an axiomatic point of view, these are the completely stabiliserpreserving (CSP) channels, defined as those that preserve the convex hull of stabiliser states. It has been an open problem to decide whether these two definitions lead to the same class of operations. In this work, we answer this question in the negative, by constructing an explicit counter-example. This indicates that recently proposed stabiliser-based simulation techniques of CSP maps are strictly more powerful than Gottesman-Knill-like methods. The result is analogous to a well-known fact in entanglement theory, namely that there is a gap between the class of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) and the class of separable channels. Along the way, we develop a number of auxiliary techniques which allow us to better characterise the set of CSP channels.

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The Gottesman-Knill theorem states that a Clifford circuit acting on stabilizer states can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer. Recently, this result has been generalized to cover inputs that are close to a coherent superposition of logarithmically many stabilizer states. The runtime of the classical simulation is governed by the stabilizer extent, which roughly measures how many stabilizer states are needed to approximate the state. An important open problem is to decide whether the extent is multiplicative under tensor products. An affirmative answer would yield an efficient algorithm for computing the extent of product inputs, while a negative result implies the existence of more efficient classical algorithms for simulating largescale quantum circuits. Here, we answer this question in the negative. Our result follows from very general properties of the set of stabilizer states, such as having a size that scales subexponentially in the dimension, and can thus be readily adapted to similar constructions for other resource theories.

We consider even unimodular lattices which are critical for potential energy with respect to Gaussian potential functions in the manifold of lattices having point density 1. All even unimodular lattices up to dimension 24 are critical. We show how to determine the Morse index in these cases. While all these lattices are either local minima or saddle points, we find lattices in dimension 32 which are local maxima. Also starting from dimension 32 there are non-critical even unimodular lattices.

Stabilizer operations (SO) occupy a prominent role in fault-tolerant quantum computing. They are defined operationally by the use of Clifford gates, Pauli measurements, and classical control. These operations can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer, a result which is known as the Gottesman–Knill theorem. However, an additional supply of magic states is enough to promote them to a universal, fault-tolerant model for quantum computing. To quantify the needed resources in terms of magic states, a resource theory of magic has been developed. SO are considered free within this theory; however, they are not the most general class of free operations. From an axiomatic point of view, these are the completely stabilizer-preserving (CSP) channels, defined as those that preserve the convex hull of stabilizer states. It has been an open problem to decide whether these two definitions lead to the same class of operations. In this work, we answer this question in the negative, by constructing an explicit counter-example. This indicates that recently proposed stabilizer-based simulation techniques of CSP maps are strictly more powerful than Gottesman–Knill-like methods. The result is analogous to a well-known fact in entanglement theory, namely, that there is a gap between the operationally defined class of local operations and classical communication and the axiomatically defined class of separable channels.