Abstract There are various gate sets that can be used to describe a quantum computation. A particularly popular gate set in the literature on quantum computing consists of arbitrary single-qubit gates and two-qubit CNOT gates. A CNOT gate is however not always the natural multi-qubit interaction that can be implemented on a given physical quantum computer, necessitating a compilation step that transforms these CNOT gates to the native gate set. An especially interesting case where compilation is necessary is for ion trap quantum computers, where the natural entangling operation can act on more than two qubits and can even act globally on all qubits at once. This calls for an entirely different approach to constructing efficient circuits. In this paper we study the problem of converting a given circuit that uses two-qubit gates to one that uses global gates. Our three main contributions are as follows. First, we find an efficient algorithm for transforming an arbitrary circuit consisting of Clifford gates and arbitrary phase gates into a circuit consisting of single-qubit gates and a number of global interactions proportional to the number of non-Clifford phases present in the original circuit. Second, we find a general strategy to transform a global gate that targets all qubits into one that targets only a subset of the qubits. This approach scales linearly with the number of qubits that are not targeted, in contrast to the exponential scaling reported in (Maslov and Nam 2018 New J. Phys. 20 033018). Third, we improve on the number of global gates required to synthesise an arbitrary n-qubit Clifford circuit from the 12n − 18 reported in (Maslov and Nam 2018 New J. Phys. 20 033018) to 6n − 8.
Abstract There are various gate sets that can be used to describe a quantum computation. A particularly popular gate set in the literature on quantum computing consists of arbitrary single-qubit gates and two-qubit CNOT gates. A CNOT gate is however not always the natural multi-qubit interaction that can be implemented on a given physical quantum computer, necessitating a compilation step that transforms these CNOT gates to the native gate set. An especially interesting case where compilation is necessary is for ion trap quantum computers, where the natural entangling operation can act on more than two qubits and can even act globally on all qubits at once. This calls for an entirely different approach to constructing efficient circuits. In this paper we study the problem of converting a given circuit that uses two-qubit gates to one that uses global gates. Our three main contributions are as follows. First, we find an efficient algorithm for transforming an arbitrary circuit consisting of Clifford gates and arbitrary phase gates into a circuit consisting of single-qubit gates and a number of global interactions proportional to the number of non-Clifford phases present in the original circuit. Second, we find a general strategy to transform a global gate that targets all qubits into one that targets only a subset of the qubits. This approach scales linearly with the number of qubits that are not targeted, in contrast to the exponential scaling reported in (Maslov and Nam 2018 New J. Phys. 20 033018). Third, we improve on the number of global gates required to synthesise an arbitrary n-qubit Clifford circuit from the 12n − 18 reported in (Maslov and Nam 2018 New J. Phys. 20 033018) to 6n − 8.
We investigate quantum circuits built from arbitrary single-qubit operations combined with programmable all-to-all multiqubit entangling gates that are native to, among other systems, trapped-ion quantum computing platforms. We report a constant-cost of no more than 6 application of such Clifford entangling multiqubit gates to realize any sequence of Clifford operations of any length, without ancillae. Furthermore, we show that any sequence of CNOT gates of any length, can be replaced with 5 applications of such Clifford entangling multiqubit gates, without ancillae. We investigate the required qubit drive power that is associated with these implementations. Our work introduces a practical and computationally efficient algorithm to realize these compilations.
Abstract Compiling quantum circuits to account for hardware restrictions is an essential part of the quantum computing stack. Circuit compilation allows us to adapt algorithm descriptions into a sequence of operations supported by real quantum hardware, and has the potential to significantly improve their performance when optimisation techniques are added to the process. One such optimisation technique is reducing the number of quantum gates that are needed to execute a circuit. For instance, methods for reducing the number of non-Clifford gates or CNOT gates from a circuit are an extensive research area that has gathered significant interest over the years. For certain hardware platforms such as trapped-ion quantum computers, we can leverage some of their special properties to further reduce the cost of executing a quantum circuit in them. In this work we use global interactions, such as the Global Mølmer–Sørensen (MS) gate present in trapped-ion hardware, to optimise and synthesise quantum circuits. We design and implement an algorithm that is able to compile an arbitrary quantum circuit into another circuit that uses global gates as the entangling operation, while optimising the number of global interactions needed. The algorithm is based on the ZX -calculus and uses a specialised circuit extraction routine that groups entangling gates into Global MS gates. We benchmark the algorithm in a variety of circuits, and show how it improves their performance under state-of-the-art hardware considerations in comparison to a naive algorithm and the Qiskit optimiser.
We investigate quantum circuits built from arbitrary single-qubit operations combined with programmable all-to-all multiqubit entangling gates that are native to, among other systems, trapped-ion quantum computing platforms. We report a constant-cost of no more than four applications of such Clifford entangling multiqubit gates to realize any sequence of Clifford operations of any length, without ancillae, which is the theoretically optimal gate count cost. We do this by implementing any sequence of CNOT gates of any length with four applications of such gates, without ancillae, and show that the extension to general Clifford operations incurs no additional cost. We investigate the required qubit drive power that is associated with our implementation and show that it is lower than that of a standard approach. Our work introduces a practical and computationally efficient algorithm to realize these compilations.
Although with some yet severe limitations, Physical working Quantum Computers are becoming available for end users. Such devices are based on the rules of Quantum Mechanics, which state that physical systems evolve through unitary transformations. However, as in the classical case, in order to have a model of computation, such unitary evolutions are expressed/approximated inside Quantum Computers in terms of a finite set of one/two qubit operations (i.e., through a universal set of gates). Single qubit gates are fault-tolerant, while the same cannot be said for two qubit gates. Hence, unitary matrices adopted in Quantum Algorithms must be synthesized in terms of this universal set of operations to obtain a quantum circuit. In such synthesis procedure we prefer circuits with minimum number of qubits and with minimum circuit depth. Clifford+T universal set is one of the most adopted in the literature for synthesis. In such set we have 3 single qubit gates and the CNOT, which is a two qubit gate. Many efforts have been directed to devise algorithms that synthesize general unitary matrices into Clifford+T circuits. These algorithms usually tend to optimize circuit depth or eventually the number of T gates. Since two qubit gates are not fault tolerant, in this work we propose an ASP based technique to minimize the number of CNOT gates inside a Clifford+T circuit. Moreover, in real world quantum computers, qubit are usually connected to each other according to some particular topology, thus providing further constraints. Two qubit gates —hence, CNOT gate— can be directly applied only to pair of gates that are connected. Such constraint has to be taken into account during the synthesis of CNOT minimal circuits. We propose an ASP model to solve the problem of synthesizing CNOT minimal circuits under topological constraints. We provide experimental evidence of the scalability of our proposal.
We develop a method to synthesize a class of entangling multi-qubit gates for a quantum computing platform with fixed Ising-type interaction with all-to-all connectivity. The only requirement on the flexibility of the interaction is that it can be switched on and off for individual qubits. Our method yields a time-optimal implementation of the multi-qubit gates. We numerically demonstrate that the total multi-qubit gate time scales approximately linear in the number of qubits. Using this gate synthesis as a subroutine, we provide compilation strategies for important use cases: (i) we show that any Clifford circuit on n qubits can be implemented using at most 2 n multi-qubit gates without requiring ancilla qubits, (ii) we decompose the quantum Fourier transform in a similar fashion, (iii) we compile a simulation of molecular dynamics, and (iv) we propose a method for the compilation of diagonal unitaries with time-optimal multi-qubit gates, as a step towards general unitaries. As motivation, we provide a detailed discussion on a microwave controlled ion trap architecture with magnetic gradient induced coupling (MAGIC) for the generation of the Ising-type interactions.
Multicontrolled unitary gates have been a subject of interest in quantum computing since their conception and are widely used in quantum algorithms. The current state-of-the-art approach to implementingn-qubit multicontrolled gates with a single target without relying on auxiliary qubits or approximate results involves the use of a quadratic number of single-qubit and CNOT gates. However, linear solutions are possible for the case where the controlled gate is special unitary, SU(2). The decomposition of ann-qubit multicontrolled SU(2) gate requires a circuit with a number of CNOT gates proportional to28n. In this work, we present a new decomposition ofn-qubit multicontrolled SU(2) gates that require a circuit with a number of CNOT gates proportional to20nand proportional to16nif the SU(2) gate has at least one real-valued diagonal. The proposed algorithms produce the most efficient known circuits and improve the existing algorithm by reducing the number of CNOT gates and the overall circuit depth. As an application, we show the use of this decomposition for sparse quantum state preparation. Our results are further validated by demonstrating a proof of principle on a quantum device accessed through quantum cloud services.