We show that the quantum parity gate on $n > 3$ qubits cannot be cleanly simulated by a quantum circuit with two layers of arbitrary C-SIGN gates of any arity and arbitrary 1-qubit unitary gates, regardless of the number of allowed ancilla qubits. This is the best known and first nontrivial separation between the parity gate and circuits of this form. The same bounds also apply to the quantum fanout gate. Our results are incomparable with those of Fang et al. [3], which apply to any constant depth but require a sublinear number of ancilla qubits on the simulating circuit.
We show that the quantum parity gate on n>3 qubits cannot be cleanly simulated by a quantum circuit with two layers of arbitrary C-SIGN gates of any arity and arbitrary 1-qubit unitary gates, regardless of the number of allowed ancilla qubits. This is the best known and first nontrivial separation between the parity gate and circuits of this form. The same bounds also apply to the quantum fanout gate. Our results are incomparable with those of Fang et al. [3], which apply to any constant depth but require a sublinear number of ancilla qubits on the simulating circuit.
We consider the resource bounded quantum circuit model with circuits restricted by the number of qubits they act upon and by their depth. Focusing on natural universal sets of gates which are familiar from classical circuit theory, several new lower bounds for constant depth quantum circuits are proved. The main result is that parity (and hence fanout) requires log depth quantum circuits, when the circuits are composed of single qubit and arbitrary size Toffoli gates, and when they use only constantly many ancill\ae. Under this constraint, this bound is close to optimal. In the case of a non-constant number a of ancill\ae\ and n input qubits, we give a tradeoff between a and the required depth, that results in a non-constant lower bound for fanout when a=n1−o(1). We also show that, regardless of the number of ancill\ae\, arbitrary arity Toffoli gates cannot be simulated exactly by a constant depth circuit family with gates of bounded arity.
We show that the parity of more than three non-target input bits cannot be computed by QAC-circuits of depth-2, not even uncleanly, regardless of the number of ancilla qubits. This result is incomparable with other recent lower bounds on constant-depth QAC-circuits by Rosenthal [ICTS~2021,arXiv:2008.07470] and uses different techniques which may be of independent interest: 1. We show that all members of a certain class of multivariate polynomials are irreducible. The proof applies a technique of Shpilka & Volkovich [STOC 2008]. 2. We give a tight-in-some-sense characterization of when a multiqubit CZ gate creates or removes entanglement from the state it is applied to. The current paper strengthens an earlier version of the paper [arXiv:2005.12169].
It is well-known that every n-qubit unitary can be implemented by a 2O(n)-depth quantum circuit using single- and two-qubit gates. It has been open whether exponential depth is *necessary* for general unitaries, even when allowing an unlimited number of ancilla qubits. Here we show, perhaps surprisingly, that all unitaries can be implemented exactly by a circuit of one- and two-qubit gates of depth poly(n) with 2O(n) ancilla qubits. In other words, every n-qubit unitary can be parallelized to polynomial depth. In fact, our depth bound is *linear* in n, which is the best possible, and an exponential improvement on the previous best bound of 2n/2 due to Rosenthal [TQC 2022, Quantum 2026]. Moreover, if we allow unbounded fan-out gates, these circuits can be further reduced to *constant* depth. Our construction takes advantage of a novel relationship connecting the unitary synthesis problem of Aaronson and Kuperberg to locally-decodable codes and private information retrieval from complexity theory and cryptography, and has a natural interpretation in bosonic quantum computation.
Bounds on the QAC0 Complexity of Approximating Parity
QAC circuits are quantum circuits with one-qubit gates and Toffoli gates of arbitrary arity. QAC0 circuits are QAC circuits of constant depth, and are quantum analogues of AC0 circuits. We prove the following: ∙ For all d≥7 and ε>0 there is a depth-d QAC circuit of size exp(poly(n1/d)log(n/ε)) that approximates the n-qubit parity function to within error ε on worst-case quantum inputs. Previously it was unknown whether QAC circuits of sublogarithmic depth could approximate parity regardless of size. ∙ We introduce a class of "mostly classical" QAC circuits, including a major component of our circuit from the above upper bound, and prove a tight lower bound on the size of low-depth, mostly classical QAC circuits that approximate this component. ∙ Arbitrary depth-d QAC circuits require at least Ω(n/d) multi-qubit gates to achieve a 1/2+exp(−o(n/d)) approximation of parity. When d=Θ(logn) this nearly matches an easy O(n) size upper bound for computing parity exactly. ∙ QAC circuits with at most two layers of multi-qubit gates cannot achieve a 1/2+exp(−o(n)) approximation of parity, even non-cleanly. Previously it was known only that such circuits could not cleanly compute parity exactly for sufficiently large n. The proofs use a new normal form for quantum circuits which may be of independent interest, and are based on reductions to the problem of constructing certain generalizations of the cat state which we name "nekomata" after an analogous cat yōkai.
In this work, we prove the strongest known lower bounds for QAC0, allowing polynomially many gates and ancillae. Our main results show that:
(1) Depth-3 QAC0 circuits cannot compute PARITY, and require Ω(exp(n)) gates to compute MAJORITY.
(2) Depth-2 circuits cannot approximate high-influence Boolean functions (e.g., PARITY) with non-negligible advantage, regardless of size.
We develop new classical simulation techniques for QAC0 to obtain our depth-3 bounds. In these results, we relax the output requirement of the quantum circuit to a single bit, making our depth 2 approximation bound stronger than the previous best bound of Rosenthal (2021). This also enables us to draw natural comparisons with classical AC0 circuits, which can compute PARITY exactly in depth 2 (exp size). Our techniques further suggest that, for boolean total functions, constant-depth quantum circuits do not necessarily provide more power than their classical counterparts. Our third result shows that depth 2 QAC0 circuits, regardless of size, cannot exactly synthesize an n-target nekomata state (a state whose synthesis is directly related to the computation of PARITY). This complements the depth 2 exponential size upper bound of Rosenthal (2021) for approximating nekomatas (which is used as a sub-circuit in the only known constant depth PARITY upper bound). Finally, we argue that approximating PARITY in QAC0, with significantly better than 1/poly(n) advantage on average, is just as hard as computing it exactly. Thus, extending our techniques to higher depths would also rule out approximate circuits for PARITY and related problems
We achieve the first constant-depth circuit for arbitrary single-qubit gate synthesis. Unlike prior approaches, the construction is fully unitary and requires no pre-supplied catalyst. For any constant δ>0, it ε-approximates an arbitrary single-qubit gate using O(log1+δ(1/ε)) clean ancillae, Hadamard and T single-qubit gates, O(log(1/ε))-width generalized Toffoli gates, and sublogarithmic-width Fan-Out gates. We further eliminate Fan-Out entirely, showing that Hadamard, T, and generalized Toffoli gates alone suffice for constant-depth synthesis. When restricted to the standard bounded-width gate model, our construction has depth O(loglog(1/ε)), and we prove a matching Ω(loglog(1/ε))-depth lower bound. Overall, we establish that Θ(loglog(1/ε))-depth is unavoidable with only bounded-width gates, yet allowing even logarithmic-width multi-qubit gates suffices to achieve constant-depth synthesis.
These results also reveal new structure in shallow quantum circuit complexity. We give a depth-preserving real simulation of bounded-error decision computation, showing that every depth-d QAC circuit can be simulated in depth O(d) using only Hadamard, X, and generalized Toffoli gates. Thus arbitrary single-qubit rotations and complex amplitudes do not increase the bounded-error decision power of QAC, even at constant depth. In particular, this reduces the long-standing conjecture Parity∈/QAC0 to proving a Parity lower bound against circuits consisting only of Hadamard, X, and generalized Toffoli gates. More generally, this real normal form exposes a direct correspondence between the standard shallow-depth quantum circuit hierarchy and a hierarchy of Forrelation circuits with restricted oracle families.