We perform a complete classification of all 56 subgroups of the two-qubit Clifford group containing the two-qubit Pauli group. We provide generators for these groups using gates familiar to the quantum information community and we reference these groups against the group libraries provided in GAP. We also list several families of groups in higher levels of the two-qubit Clifford hierarchy.
We perform a complete classification of all 56 subgroups of the two-qubit Clifford group containing the two-qubit Pauli group. We provide generators for these groups using gates familiar to the quantum information community and we reference these groups against the group libraries provided in GAP. We also list several families of groups in higher levels of the two-qubit Clifford hierarchy.
Here we study the unitary groups that can be constructed using elements from the qubit Clifford Hierarchy. We first provide a necessary and sufficient canonical form that semi-Clifford and generalized semi-Clifford elements must satisfy to be in the Clifford Hierarchy. Then we classify the groups that can be formed from such elements. Up to Clifford conjugation, we classify all such groups that can be constructed using generalized semi-Clifford elements in the Clifford Hierarchy. We discuss a possible minor exception to this classification in the appendix. This may not be a full classification of all groups in the qubit Clifford Hierarchy as it is not currently known if all elements in the Clifford Hierarchy must be generalized semi-Clifford. In addition to the diagonal gate groups found by Cui et al., we show that many non-isomorphic (to the diagonal gate groups) generalized symmetric groups are also contained in the Clifford Hierarchy. Finally, as an application of this classification, we examine restrictions on transversal gates given by the structure of the groups enumerated herein which may be of independent interest.
The Clifford hierarchy is a nested sequence of sets of quantum gates that can be fault-tolerantly performed using gate teleportation within standard quantum error correction schemes. The groups of Pauli and Clifford gates constitute the first and second ‘levels’, respectively. Non-Clifford gates from the third level or higher, such as the T gate, are necessary for achieving fault-tolerant universal quantum computation. Since it was defined 26 years ago by Gottesman–Chuang, two questions have been studied by numerous researchers. First, precisely which gates constitute the Clifford hierarchy? Second, which subset of the hierarchy gates admit efficient gate teleportation protocols? We completely solve both questions in the practically relevant case of the Clifford hierarchy for gates of one qubit or one qudit of prime dimension. We express every such hierarchy gate uniquely as a product of three simple gates, yielding also a formula for the size of every level. These results are a consequence of our finding that all such hierarchy gates can be expressed in a certain form that guarantees efficient gate teleportation. Our decomposition of Clifford gates as a unique product of three elementary Clifford gates is of broad applicability.
The Clifford hierarchy is a fundamental structure in quantum computation, classifying unitary operators based on their commutation relations with the Pauli group. Despite its significance, the mathematical structure of the hierarchy is not well understood at the third level and higher. In this work, we study permutations in the hierarchy: gates which permute the 2n basis states. We fully characterize all the semi-Clifford permutation gates. Moreover, we prove that any permutation gate in the third level, not necessarily semi-Clifford, must be a product of Toffoli gates in what we define as staircase form, up to left and right multiplications of Clifford permutations. Finally, we show that the smallest number of qubits for which there exists a non-semi-Clifford permutation in the third level is 7.
The Clifford hierarchy plays a crucial role in the stabilizer formalism of quantum error correction and quantum computation. Apart form the zeroth level (the discrete Heisenberg–Weyl group) and the first level (the Clifford group), all other levels of the Clifford hierarchy are not groups. However, the diagonal gates at all levels do form groups, and it is desirable to characterize their generators and structures. In this paper, we study the diagonal gates at the second level of the Clifford hierarchy. For this, we introduce the notion of a T -gate in an arbitrary dimension, generalizing the corresponding notion in prime dimensions. By the use of the T -gate, we are able to completely characterize the group structures of the diagonal gates at the second level of the Clifford hierarchy in any (not necessarily prime) dimension. It turns out that the classification depends crucially on the number-theoretic nature of the dimension. The results highlight the special role of the first two primes, 2 and 3 , in the prime factorization of the dimension. The T -gate in an arbitrary dimension, apart from its key role as a generator of the diagonal gates, may have independent interest and further applications in quantum theory.
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 develop a simple and systematic route to higher levels of the qubit Clifford hierarchy by coherently controlling Clifford operations. Our approach is based on Pauli periodicity, defined for a Clifford unitary U as the smallest integer m≥1 such that U2m is a Pauli operator up to phase. We prove a sharp controlled-jump rule showing that the controlled gate CU lies strictly in level m+2 of the hierarchy, and equivalently that CU lies in level k if U2k−2 is Pauli while no smaller positive power of U is Pauli. We further quantify the resources required to realize large level jumps in the Clifford hierarchy by proving an essentially tight upper bound on Pauli periodicity as a function of the number of qubits, which implies that accessing high hierarchy levels through controlled Cliffords requires a number of target qubits that grows exponentially with the desired level. We complement this limitation with explicit infinite families of Pauli-periodic Cliffords whose controlled versions achieve asymptotically optimal jumps. As an application, we propose a protocol for preparing logical catalyst states that enable logical Z1/2k phase gates via phase kickback from a single jumped Clifford.