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arXiv:1603.03999 · Quantum

The Classification of Clifford Gates over Qubits

Daniel Grier, Luke Schaeffer

Published Jun 13, 2022• 15 citations
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Abstract

We examine the following problem: given a collection of Clifford gates, describe the set of unitaries generated by circuits composed of those gates. Specifically, we allow the standard circuit operations of composition and tensor product, as well as ancillary workspace qubits as long as they start and end in states uncorrelated with the input, which rule out common "magic state injection" techniques that make Clifford circuits universal. We show that there are exactly 57 classes of Clifford unitaries and present a full classification characterizing the gate sets which generate them. This is the first attempt at a quantum extension of the classification of reversible classical gates introduced by Aaronson et al., another part of an ambitious program to classify all quantum gate sets. The classification uses, at its center, a reinterpretation of the tableau representation of Clifford gates to give circuit decompositions, from which elementary generators can easily be extracted. The 57 different classes are generated in this way, 30 of which arise from the single-qubit subgroups of the Clifford group. At a high level, the remaining classes are arranged according to the bases they preserve. For instance, the CNOT gate preserves the X and Z bases because it maps X-basis elements to X-basis elements and Z-basis elements to Z-basis elements. The remaining classes are characterized by more subtle tableau invariants; for instance, the T_4 and phase gate generate a proper subclass of Z-preserving gates.

DOI
10.22331/q-2022-06-13-734

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In this paper, we introduce the notion of a normal form of one qubit quantum circuits over the basis $\{H, P, T\}$, where $H$, $P$ and $T$ denote the Hadamard, Phase and $π/8$ gates, respectively. This basis is known as the {\it standard set} and its universality has been shown by Boykin et al. [FOCS '99]. Our normal form has several nice properties: (i) Every circuit over this basis can easily be transformed into a normal form, and (ii) Every two normal form circuits compute same unitary matrix if and only if both circuits are identical. We also show that the number of unitary operations that can be represented by a circuit over this basis that contains at most $n$ $T$-gates is exactly $192 \cdot (3 \cdot 2^n - 2)$.

arXiv:0806.3834•Jun 24, 2008•26 citations
We examine the following problem: given a collection of Clifford gates, describe the set of unitaries generated by circuits composed of those gates. Specifically, we allow the standard circuit operations of composition and tensor product, as well as ancillary workspace qubits as long as they start and end in states uncorrelated with the input, which rule out common "magic state injection" techniques that make Clifford circuits universal. We show that there are exactly 57 classes of Clifford unitaries and present a full classification characterizing the gate sets which generate them. This is the first attempt at a quantum extension of the classification of reversible classical gates introduced by Aaronson et al., another part of an ambitious program to classify all quantum gate sets. The classification uses, at its center, a reinterpretation of the tableau representation of Clifford gates to give circuit decompositions, from which elementary generators can easily be extracted. The 57 different classes are generated in this way, 30 of which arise from the single-qubit subgroups of the Clifford group. At a high level, the remaining classes are arranged according to the bases they preserve. For instance, the CNOT gate preserves the X and Z bases because it maps X-basis elements to X-basis elements and Z-basis elements to Z-basis elements. The remaining classes are characterized by more subtle tableau invariants; for instance, the T_4 and phase gate generate a proper subclass of Z-preserving gates.
We present a complete classification of quantum stabilizer gates in terms of the functions they generate assuming the ability to swap qubits and use ancillary workspace. Because we view these stabilizer circuits as subroutines of some general quantum computation, we insist that any ancilla qubits used during the computation must not change in an input-dependent manner. This is the first attempt at a quantum extension of the classification of reversible classical gates introduced by Aaronson et al., another part of an ambitious program to classify all quantum gate sets. The classification uses, at its center, a reinterpretation of the tableau representation of stabilizer gates to give circuit decompositions, from which elementary generators can easily be extracted. There are a total of 57 different stabilizer classes generated in this way, 30 of which arise from the single-qubit subgroups of the Clifford group. At a high level, the remaining classes are arranged according to the bases they preserve. For instance, the CNOT gate preserves the X and Z bases because it maps X-basis elements to X-basis elements and Z-basis elements to Z-basis elements. The remaining classes are characterized by more subtle tableau invariants; for instance, the T_4 and phase gate generate a proper subclass of Z-preserving gates.
Quantum computations starting with computational basis states and involving only Clifford operations, are classically simulable despite the fact that they generate highly entangled states; this is the content of the Gottesman-Knill theorem. Here we isolate the ingredients of the theorem and provide generalisations of some of them with the aim of identifying new classes of simulable quantum computations. In the usual construction, Clifford operations arise as projective normalisers of the first and second tensor powers of the Pauli group. We consider replacing the Pauli group by an arbitrary finite subgroup GGG of U(d)U(d)U(d). In particular we seek GGG such that G⊗GG\otimes GG⊗G has an entangling normaliser. Via a generalisation of the Gottesman-Knill theorem the resulting normalisers lead to classes of quantum circuits that can be classically efficiently simulated. For the qubit case d=2d = 2d=2 we exhaustively treat all finite irreducible subgroups of U(2)U(2)U(2) and find that the only ones (up to unitary equivalence and trivial phase extensions) with entangling normalisers are the groups generated by X and the nthn^{\rm th}nth root of ZZZ for n∈Nn \in \Nn∈N.
This chapter introduces Boolean quantum gates that allow us to map any Boolean circuit in such a way that the circuit becomes reversible. It describes quantum gates for one qubit, like for example Clifford gates that are the elements of the Clifford group and can be efficiently simulated with a classical computer. The chapter introduces the controlled-U gates and the unitary decomposition and formulate the process of transpilation. A Boolean quantum circuit represents a permutation in Hilbert space and can be represented by a unitary permutation matrix composed of the unitary matrices representing the quantum gates. Such a mapping does not alter the distribution of the amplitudes; the distribution remains unchanged during the execution of the quantum Boolean gates.
Fault-tolerant gate sets whose generators belong to the Clifford hierarchy form the basis of many protocols for scalable quantum computing architectures. At the beginning of the decade, number-theoretic techniques were employed to analyze circuits over these gate sets on single qubits, providing the basis for a number of state-of-the-art quantum compiling algorithms. In this dissertation, I further this program by employing number-theoretic techniques for higher-dimensional gate sets on both qudit and multi-qubit circuits. First, I introduce canonical forms for single qutrit Clifford+T circuits and prove that every single-qutrit Clifford+T operator admits a unique such canonical form. I show that these canonical forms are T-optimal and describe an algorithm which takes as input a Clifford+T circuit and outputs the canonical form for that operator. The algorithm runs in time linear in the number of gates of the circuit. Our results provide a higher-dimensional generalization of prior work by Matsumoto and Amano who introduced similar canonical forms for single-qubit Clifford+T circuits. Finally, we show that a similar extension of these normal forms to higher dimensions exists, but do not establish uniqueness. Moving to multi-qubit circuits, I provide number-theoretic characterizations for certain restricted Clifford+T circuits by considering unitary matrices over subrings of Z[1/√2, i]. We focus on the subrings Z[1/2], Z[1/√2], Z[1/√−2], and Z[1/2, i], and we prove that unitary matrices with entries in these rings correspond to circuits over well-known universal gate sets. In each case, the desired gate set is obtained by extending the set of classical reversible gates {X, CX, CCX} with an analogue of the Hadamard gate and an optional phase gate. I then establish the existence and uniqueness of a normal form for one of these gate sets, the two-qubit gate set of Clifford+Controlled Phase gate CS. This normal form is optimal in the number of CS gates, making it the first normal form that is non-Clifford optimal for a fault tolerant universal multi-qubit gate set. We provide a synthesis algorithm that runs in a time linear in the gate count and outputs the equivalent normal form. In proving the existence and uniqueness of the normal form, we likewise establish the generators and relations for the two-qubit Clifford+CS group. Finally, we demonstrate that a lower bound of 5 log2 (1/ε) + O(1) CS gates are required to ε-approximate any 4 × 4 unitary matrix. Lastly, using the characterization of circuits over the Clifford+CS gate set and the existence of an optimal normal form, I provide an ancilla-free inexact synthesis algorithm for two-qubit unitaries using the Clifford+SC gate set for Pauli-rotations. These operators require 6 log2 (1/ε) + O(1) CS gates to synthesize in the typical case and 8 log2 (1/ε) + O(1) in the worst case.
A popular universal gate set for quantum computing with qubits is Clifford+T, as this can be readily implemented on many fault-tolerant architectures. For qutrits, there is an equivalent T gate, that, like its qubit analogue, makes Clifford+T approximately universal, is injectable by a magic state, and supports magic state distillation. However, it was claimed that a better gate set for qutrits might be Clifford+R, where R=diag(1,1,-1) is the metaplectic gate, as certain protocols and gates could more easily be implemented using the R gate than the T gate. In this paper we show that when we have at least two qutrits, the qutrit Clifford+R unitaries form a strict subset of the Clifford+T unitaries, by finding a direct decomposition of R⊗IR \otimes \mathbb{I}R⊗I as a Clifford+T circuit and proving that the T gate cannot be exactly synthesized in Clifford+R. This shows that in fact the T gate is at least as powerful as the R gate, up to a constant factor. Moreover, we additionally show that it is impossible to find a single-qutrit Clifford+T decomposition of the R gate, making our result tight.
Representation of Quantum Circuits with Clifford and π/8π/8π/8 Gates
In this paper, we introduce the notion of a normal form of one qubit quantum circuits over the basis {H,P,T}\{H, P, T\}{H,P,T}, where HHH, PPP and TTT denote the Hadamard, Phase and π/8π/8π/8 gates, respectively. This basis is known as the {\it standard set} and its universality has been shown by Boykin et al. [FOCS '99]. Our normal form has several nice properties: (i) Every circuit over this basis can easily be transformed into a normal form, and (ii) Every two normal form circuits compute same unitary matrix if and only if both circuits are identical. We also show that the number of unitary operations that can be represented by a circuit over this basis that contains at most nnn TTT-gates is exactly 192⋅(3⋅2n−2)192 \cdot (3 \cdot 2^n - 2)192⋅(3⋅2n−2).