One-shot distillation with constant overhead using catalysts

Quantum resource distillation is a fundamental task in quantum information science and technology. Minimizing the overhead of distillation is crucial for the realization of quantum computation and other technologies. Here we explicitly demonstrate how, for general quantum resources, suitably designed quantum catalysts (i.e., auxiliary systems that remain unchanged before and after the process) can lift the multi-shot or asymptotic average distillation overhead to the one-shot setting. This can enable one-shot distillation with constant overhead, thereby overcoming the established logarithmic lower bound. In particular, for magic state distillation, our catalysis method paves a path for tackling the diverging batch size problem associated with code-based low-overhead protocols by enabling arbitrary reduction of the protocol size for any desired accuracy. Notably, this yields constant-overhead magic state distillation with controllable protocol size. Furthermore, we demonstrate a tunable spacetime trade-off between overhead and success probability enabled by catalysts which offers significant versatility for practical implementation. Finally, we extend catalysis techniques to dynamical quantum resources and show that channel mutual information determines one-shot catalytic channel transformation, thereby advancing our understanding for both dynamical catalysis and information theory.