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arXiv:1706.07884

Factoring with n+2 clean qubits and n-1 dirty qubits

Craig Gidney

Published Jun 23, 2017• 28 citations
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Abstract

We present reversible classical circuits for performing various arithmetic operations aided by dirty ancillae (i.e. extra qubits in an unknown state that must be restored before the circuit ends). We improve the number of clean qubits needed to factor an n-bit number with Shor's algorithm from 1.5n+O(1) to n+2, assisted by n-1 dirty qubits, without increasing the asymptotic size or depth of the circuit.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1706.07884

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We present reversible classical circuits for performing various arithmetic operations aided by dirty ancillae (i.e. extra qubits in an unknown state that must be restored before the circuit ends). We improve the number of clean qubits needed to factor an n-bit number with Shor's algorithm from 1.5n+O(1) to n+2, assisted by n-1 dirty qubits, without increasing the asymptotic size or depth of the circuit.
We try to minimize the number of qubits needed to factor an integer of n bits using Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer. We introduce a circuit which uses 2n+3 qubits and O(n^3 lg(n)) elementary quantum gates in a depth of O(n^3) to implement the factorization algorithm. The circuit is computable in polynomial time on a classical computer and is completely general as it does not rely on any property of the number to be factored. Keywords: Factorization, quantum circuits, modular arithmetics
In this note we consider optimised circuits for implementing Shor's quantum factoring algorithm. First I give a circuit for which none of the about 2n qubits need to be initialised (though we still have to make the usual 2n measurements later on). Then I show how the modular additions in the algorithm can be carried out with a superposition of an arithmetic sequence. This makes parallelisation of Shor's algorithm easier. Finally I show how one can factor with only about 1.5n qubits, and maybe even fewer.
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We construct a quantum circuit for Shor's factoring algorithm that uses 2n+2 qubits, where n is the length of the number to be factored. The depth and size of the circuit are O(n^3) and O(n^3\log n), respectively. The number of qubits used in the circuit is less than that in any other quantum circuit ever constructed for Shor's factoring algorithm. Moreover, the size of the circuit is about half the size of Beauregard's quantum circuit for Shor's factoring algorithm, which uses 2n+3 qubits.
Reversible circuits for modular multiplication Cx%MCx\%MCx%M with x<Mx<Mx<M arise as components of modular exponentiation in Shor's quantum number-factoring algorithm. However, existing generic constructions focus on asymptotic gate count and circuit depth rather than actual values, producing fairly large circuits not optimized for specific CCC and MMM values. In this work, we develop such optimizations in a bottom-up fashion, starting with most convenient CCC values. When zero-initialized ancilla registers are available, we reduce the search for compact circuits to a shortest-path problem. Some of our modular-multiplication circuits are asymptotically smaller than previous constructions, but worst-case bounds and average sizes remain Θ(n2)\Theta(n^2)Θ(n2). In the context of modular exponentiation, we offer several constant-factor improvements, as well as an improvement by a constant additive term that is significant for few-qubit circuits arising in ongoing laboratory experiments with Shor's algorithm.