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arXiv:2012.06074 · npj Quantum Information

6-qubit optimal Clifford circuits

Sergey B. Bravyi, Joseph A. Latone, Dmitri Maslov

Published Jul 5, 2022• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Clifford group lies at the core of quantum computation—it underlies quantum error correction, its elements can be used to perform magic state distillation and they form randomized benchmarking protocols, Clifford group is used to study quantum entanglement, and more. The ability to utilize Clifford group elements in practice relies heavily on the efficiency of their circuit-level implementation. Finding short circuits is a hard problem; despite Clifford group being finite, its size grows quickly with the number of qubits n, limiting known optimal implementations to n = 4 qubits. For n = 6, the number of Clifford group elements is about 2.1 × 1023. In this paper, we report a set of algorithms, along with their C implementation, that implicitly synthesize optimal circuits for all 6-qubit Clifford group elements by storing a subset of the latter in a database of size 2.1TB (1kB = 1024B). We demonstrate how to extract arbitrary optimal 6-qubit Clifford circuit in 0.0009358 and 0.0006274 s using consumer- and enterprise-grade computers (hardware) respectively, while relying on this database. We use this implementation to establish a new example of quantum advantage by Clifford circuits over CNOT gate circuits and find optimal Clifford 2-designs for up to 4 qubits.

DOI
10.1038/s41534-022-00583-7

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Abstract Clifford group lies at the core of quantum computation—it underlies quantum error correction, its elements can be used to perform magic state distillation and they form randomized benchmarking protocols, Clifford group is used to study quantum entanglement, and more. The ability to utilize Clifford group elements in practice relies heavily on the efficiency of their circuit-level implementation. Finding short circuits is a hard problem; despite Clifford group being finite, its size grows quickly with the number of qubits n, limiting known optimal implementations to n = 4 qubits. For n = 6, the number of Clifford group elements is about 2.1 × 1023. In this paper, we report a set of algorithms, along with their C implementation, that implicitly synthesize optimal circuits for all 6-qubit Clifford group elements by storing a subset of the latter in a database of size 2.1TB (1kB = 1024B). We demonstrate how to extract arbitrary optimal 6-qubit Clifford circuit in 0.0009358 and 0.0006274 s using consumer- and enterprise-grade computers (hardware) respectively, while relying on this database. We use this implementation to establish a new example of quantum advantage by Clifford circuits over CNOT gate circuits and find optimal Clifford 2-designs for up to 4 qubits.
The Clifford group is a finite subgroup of the unitary group generated by the Hadamard, the CNOT, and the Phase gates. This group plays a prominent role in quantum error correction, randomized benchmarking protocols, and the study of entanglement. Here we consider the problem of finding a short quantum circuit implementing a given Clifford group element. Our methods aim to minimize the entangling gate count assuming all-to-all qubit connectivity. First, we consider circuit optimization based on template matching and design Clifford-specific templates that leverage the ability to factor out Pauli and SWAP gates. Second, we introduce a symbolic peephole optimization method. It works by projecting the full circuit onto a small subset of qubits and optimally recompiling the projected subcircuit via dynamic programming. CNOT gates coupling the chosen subset of qubits with the remaining qubits are expressed using symbolic Pauli gates. Software implementation of these methods finds circuits that are only 0.2% away from optimal for 6 qubits and reduces the two-qubit gate count in circuits with up to 64 qubits by 64.7% on average, compared with the Aaronson-Gottesman canonical form.
Random Clifford operators have numerous applications in quantum computing, including randomized benchmarking, classical shadows, and quantum authentication. However, sampling and implementing uniformly random nnn-qubit Clifford incur near-quadratic complexity due to the size of Clifford group. We introduce a cryptographic way to overcome these barriers: trapdoored Clifford operator distributions whose samples are computationally indistinguishable from uniformly random Cliffords, yet implementing them can be much faster given the trapdoor. We construct a distribution of trapdoored Clifford operators whose elements can be sampled and implemented in near-linear time under a variant of the learning parity with noise assumption. Our constructions allow fast tableau action on Pauli labels for classical simulation, and also can be optimized to admit polylogarithmic-depth implementation. Along the way, we construct trapdoored matrices over finite fields that support efficient multiplication by both a matrix and its inverse, resolving an open question left by Vaikuntanathan and Zamir [SODA'26]. We use these constructions to obtain faster protocols based on random Cliffords. We also explore their applications to the worst-case to average-case reductions for matrix and Clifford problems including the iterated matrix multiplication and Clifford circuit synthesis. In particular, we show the hardness of batching Clifford circuits: synthesizing circuits that apply the same Clifford to multiple registers is at least as hard as worst-case matrix multiplication, even when synthesis succeeds on a small constant fraction of random Cliffords. This extends to approximate implementations by general quantum circuits.
Abstract We study two-qubit circuits over the Clifford+CS gate set, which consists of the Clifford gates together with the controlled-phase gate CS = diag(1, 1, 1, i). The Clifford+CS gate set is universal for quantum computation and its elements can be implemented fault-tolerantly in most error-correcting schemes through magic state distillation. Since non-Clifford gates are typically more expensive to perform in a fault-tolerant manner, it is often desirable to construct circuits that use few CS gates. In the present paper, we introduce an efficient and optimal synthesis algorithm for two-qubit Clifford+CS operators. Our algorithm inputs a Clifford+CS operator U and outputs a Clifford+CS circuit for U, which uses the least possible number of CS gates. Because the algorithm is deterministic, the circuit it associates to a Clifford+CS operator can be viewed as a normal form for that operator. We give an explicit description of these normal forms and use this description to derive a worst-case lower bound of 5log2(1ϵ)+O(1)5{{\rm{log}}}_{2}(\frac{1}{\epsilon })+O(1)5log2​(ϵ1​)+O(1) 5 log 2 ( 1 ϵ ) + O ( 1 ) on the number of CS gates required to ϵ-approximate elements of SU(4). Our work leverages a wide variety of mathematical tools that may find further applications in the study of fault-tolerant quantum circuits.
Efficiently implementing Clifford circuits is crucial for quantum error correction and quantum algorithms. Linear reversible circuits, equivalent to circuits composed of CNOT\xspace gates, have important applications in classical computing. In this work we present methods for CNOT\xspace and general Clifford circuit synthesis which can be used to minimise either the entangling two-qubit gate count or the circuit depth. We present three families of algorithms - optimal synthesis which works on small circuits, A* synthesis for intermediate-size circuits and greedy synthesis for large circuits. We benchmark against existing methods, including rustiq, tket and qiskit and show that our approach results in circuits with lower two-qubit gate count. For encoding circuits, our methods outperform previous reinforcement learning results and find a lower two-qubit gate count circuit for the Golay code than previously known. The algorithms have been implemented in a GitHub repository for use by the classical and quantum computing community.
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.
Minimizing the number of CNOT gates required to synthesize a Clifford operator is a central problem in quantum circuit optimization. We extend the link--middle--cut (LMC) framework for linear reversible circuits to Clifford operators represented by binary symplectic tableaux. By introducing block-support connectivity graphs and determinantal invariants, we obtain efficiently computable lower bounds on ancilla-free CNOT complexity. We prove that these bounds are tight for qubit permutations: a permutation of nnn qubits with kkk cycles requires exactly 3(n−k)3(n-k)3(n−k) CNOT gates, even when arbitrary one-qubit Clifford gates are available. We also derive efficiently computable bounds for synthesis up to a permutation of the output qubits, corresponding to free qubit relabeling. Finally, we further demonstrate the utility of the bound by using it as an admissible heuristic for A∗A^*A∗-based Clifford synthesis and show that, on benchmark instances, the resulting search can prove optimality beyond what was possible with earlier SAT-based methods, and that it may be used in combination with earlier A∗A^*A∗ heuristics to improve the CNOT counts obtained through heuristic search.