Extremizing Measures of Magic on Pure States by Clifford-stabilizer States

Abstract

Magic states enable universal, fault-tolerant quantum computation within the stabilizer framework. Their non-stabilizerness supplies the resource needed to bypass the Eastin-Knill theorem while allowing fault-tolerant distillation. Although many measures of magic exist, not every nonzero-magic state is known to be distillable, and many of currently known distillable states are special cases of Clifford-stabilizer states, defined as pure states uniquely stabilized by finite Clifford subgroups. We develop a general framework for group-covariant functionals on Hermitian operators, introducing the notions of $G$-stabilizer spaces, states, and codes for arbitrary finite subgroups $G \subset \mathrm{U}(\mathcal{H})$. We define analytic families of $G$-covariant functionals and prove that any $G$-invariant pure state is extremal for a broad class of derived functionals, including symmetric, max-type, and Rényi-type functionals, whenever the underlying family is $G$-covariant. This extremality holds for purity-preserving variations orthogonal to the stabilized subspace. Specializing to the Pauli and Clifford groups, we recover the extremality structure of canonical magic measures such as mana, stabilizer Rényi entropies, generalized Rényi entropies, and stabilizer fidelity, and show that Clifford-stabilizer states extremize them. We classify such states for qubits, qutrits, ququints, and two-qubit systems, identifying new candidates for magic distillation. We further propose an inefficient distillation protocol for a two-qubit magic state with stabilizer fidelity exceeding standard benchmarks, and conjecture that SIC-POVM fiducial states are Clifford-stabilizer states.