Quantifying magic resource via quantum Jensen–Shannon divergence

Abstract Magic is a precious resource necessary for achieving universal fault-tolerant quantum computation. Therefore, it is of vital importance to study the detection and quantification of the magic resource encompassed in quantum states and quantum gates both theoretically and experimentally. In this work, we adopt the quantum Jensen–Shannon divergence to quantify the magic resource of quantum states and quantum gates. On the one hand, we determine the magic resource of a pure state as the minimal and average distance between this state and the set of pure stabilizer states via the quantum Jensen–Shannon divergence, respectively, and extend them to the general mixed states through the method of convex roof construction. We investigate the basic properties of these two magic quantifiers and utilize them to evaluate the magic resource for some typical qubit and qutrit states. By comparing the magic quantifier via the quantum Jensen–Shannon divergence with the min-relative entropy of magic and the stabilizer α -Rényi entropies, we find that the min-relative entropy of magic provides both an upper bound and a lower bound for the magic quantifier via the quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence, and the stabilizer α -Rényi entropies provide a series of lower bounds for the magic quantifier via the quantum Jensen–Shannon divergence. On the other hand, based on the magic quantifier via the quantum Jensen–Shannon divergence for quantum states, we further propose two quantifiers for the magic-resource-generating power of quantum gates and demonstrate that the T -gate is the optimal diagonal unitary gate in creating magic resource for both qubit and qutrit systems in the sense of Clifford equivalence.