Entirely nonlocal quantum magic without entanglement

Abstract

Nonstabilizerness, or magic, is an archetypal \emph{quantum} resource that is necessary for quantum computational advantage. Here we uncover a phenomenon seemingly at odds with the quantum nature of magic: entirely nonlocal magic (ENM)---magic present only in correlations and absent from each party's marginal---can live without entanglement. We systematically study this separation and show it is universal and operationally reversible: every magical state or channel can be encoded into and recovered from a separable ENM realization using only local stabilizer processing and classical communication. We leverage this mechanism to devise an activation key protocol in which a classical key controls access to non-Clifford operations. We further formulate magic secret sharing, in which computational power inaccessible to any party alone becomes accessible through cooperation. On a superconducting quantum processor, we experimentally demonstrate activation key and network computing primitives, together with separable ENM state preparation and extraction protocols. Together, our results establish that magic can be classically activated, localized, and secret-shared without entanglement, providing new resource-control primitives for distributed quantum computation.