  When visualised as an operation on the Bloch sphere, the qubit
"pi-over-eight" gate corresponds to one-eighth of a complete rotation about the
vertical axis. This simple gate often plays an important role in quantum
information theory, typically in situations for which Pauli and Clifford gates
are insufficient. Most notably, when it supplements the set of Clifford gates
then universal quantum computation can be achieved. The "pi-over-eight" gate is
the simplest example of an operation from the third level of the Clifford
hierarchy (i.e., it maps Pauli operations to Clifford operations under
conjugation). Here we derive explicit expressions for all qudit (d-level, where
d is prime) versions of this gate and analyze the resulting group structure
that is generated by these diagonal gates. This group structure differs
depending on whether the dimensionality of the qudit is two, three or greater
than three. We then discuss the geometrical relationship of these gates (and
associated states) with respect to Clifford gates and stabilizer states. We
present evidence that these gates are maximally robust to depolarizing and
phase damping noise, in complete analogy with the qubit case. Motivated by this
and other similarities we conjecture that these gates could be useful for the
task of qudit magic-state distillation and, by extension, fault-tolerant
quantum computing. Very recent, independent work by Campbell, Anwar and Browne
confirms the correctness of this intuition, and we build upon their work to
characterize noise regimes for which noisy implementations of these gates can
(or provably cannot) supplement Clifford gates to enable universal quantum
computation.
