We show that the T -depth of any single-qubit z -rotation can be reduced to 3 if a certain catalyst state is available. To achieve an ϵ -approximation, it suffices to have a catalyst state of size polynomial in log ( 1 / ϵ ) . This implies that Q N C f 0 / q p o l y admits a finite universal gate set consisting of Clifford+ T . In particular, there are catalytic constant T -depth circuits that approximate multi-qubit Toffoli, adder, and quantum Fourier transform arbitrarily well. We also show that the catalyst state can be prepared in time polynomial in log ( 1 / ϵ ) .
We show that the T -depth of any single-qubit z -rotation can be reduced to 3 if a certain catalyst state is available. To achieve an ϵ -approximation, it suffices to have a catalyst state of size polynomial in log ( 1 / ϵ ) . This implies that Q N C f 0 / q p o l y admits a finite universal gate set consisting of Clifford+ T . In particular, there are catalytic constant T -depth circuits that approximate multi-qubit Toffoli, adder, and quantum Fourier transform arbitrarily well. We also show that the catalyst state can be prepared in time polynomial in log ( 1 / ϵ ) .
Since an n-qubit circuit consisting of CNOT gates can have up to Ω(n2/logn) CNOT gates, it is natural to expect that Ω(n2/logn) Toffoli gates are needed to apply a controlled version of such a circuit. We show that the Toffoli count can be reduced to at most n. The Toffoli depth can also be reduced to O(1), at the cost of 2n Toffoli gates, even without using any ancilla or measurement. In fact, using a measurement-based uncomputation, the Toffoli depth can be further reduced to 1. From this, we give two corollaries: any controlled Clifford circuit can be implemented with O(1) T-depth, and any Clifford+T circuit with T-depth D can be controlled with T-depth O(D), even without ancillas. As an application, we show how to catalyze a rotation by any angle up to precision ε in T-depth exactly 1 using a universal ⌈log2(8/ε)⌉-qubit catalyst state.
Building generic gates from a restricted gate set is a difficult but important problem, especially in the noisy regime where only a limited set of noise-resistant gates are available, e.g., fault-tolerant Clifford gates (generated by Hadamard, phase, and gates) and fault-tolerant Toffoli gates. The Toffoli is also often used as a building block of many algorithms and will need to be constructed if not directly available. This makes Clifford + Toffoli an attractive gate set for building generic gates. In this Letter we give a simple and efficient algorithm for building an approximate single-qubit rotation using only Clifford + Toffoli , which in turn enables any generic single-qubit unitary. An important difference compared to earlier attempts is that the use of the Toffoli allows us to use simple rounding as opposed to a complicated approximation algorithm. The resulting gate array does not rely on repeatedly applying a fixed rotation, but immediately applies a rotation R θ * that is ε -close to the desired rotation R θ , with a success probability strictly greater than 1 / 2 . It can be rerun upon failure, giving an expected number of repetitions strictly less than 2, an expected Toffoli count strictly less than 4 ⌈ log 1 ε ⌉ , an expected gate depth strictly less than 4 ⌈ log 1 ε ⌉ + 6 , and uses 2 ⌈ log 1 ε ⌉ ancillas. The small circuit depth of our construction enables low-noise gates on existing quantum computational devices, and allows for arbitrary precision using a very modest number of ancillas. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Classical circuits with unbounded fan-in can compute any Boolean function in constant depth when their size is unrestricted. We ask whether removing the restrictions on circuit size and ancillary qubits also allows quantum circuits built from arbitrary single-qubit gates and generalised Toffoli gates to implement every unitary in constant depth.
We give exact constant-depth constructions for arbitrary permutations of computational basis states, diagonal unitaries and the preparation of arbitrary pure states. These connect quantum state preparation to reversible classical computation and the preparation of probability distributions. With fanout in the gate set, they use exponentially many gates and ancillary qubits and return all ancillary qubits to zero. Replacing fanout by an exact circuit over the original gate set preserves constant depth, although the size bounds can become doubly exponential.
The implementation of arbitrary unitaries in constant depth remains open. We give equivalent formulations in terms of copying the vectors of a specified orthonormal basis, extracting their labels and implementing restricted families of unitaries. We also reduce arbitrary unitary implementation to that of traceless unitary involutions using one additional clean qubit. With adaptive measurements, gate teleportation gives depth proportional to the level of a gate in the Clifford hierarchy.
Towards arbitrary unitary implementation in constant depth, we use port-based teleportation: for input dimension d and M≥d2−1 ports, we construct a unitary circuit of depth O(d), independent of M and including resource preparation and port selection, with entanglement fidelity at least (1−(d2−1)/(2M))2. Thus, at fixed d, the approximation can be made arbitrarily accurate without increasing depth. Whether the dependence on d can also be removed remains open.
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.
Additional qubits can reduce the depth of a quantum circuit by providing workspace for parallel computation, but standard constructions assume that this workspace is initialized in a known state. In this work we study catalytic implementations, i.e. asking whether dirty qubits can instead be used provided that their joint state including any entanglement with other registers is restored exactly at the end of the computation. We show that every n-qubit Clifford circuit has a catalytic implementation of depth O(logn) using O(n2/log2n) catalytic qubits and no clean qubits, matching the asymptotic depth achievable when clean workspace is available. We extend this approach to diagonal elements of any fixed level Ck of the Clifford hierarchy, which admit catalytic implementations of depth O(log(n+1)) with O(nk/log(n)) gates and O(nk/log2(n)) catalytic qubits, as well as to semi-Clifford Gates.
Approximate synthesis of general single-qubit unitaries over the Clifford+T gate set
For the standard Clifford+T gate set, deterministic, ancilla-free synthesis now attains the minimal T-count for general single-qubit unitaries (Morisaki et al., arXiv:2510.05816). The T gate rotates by half the angle of T, generating a finer lattice of implementable operations. Access to this magic state is expected to lower the cost of deterministic and ancilla-free synthesis of general single-qubit unitaries (Kliuchnikov et al., arXiv:2203.10064), but no direct Clifford+T algorithm existed for this case. We provide one by extending the integer lattice-point enumeration method of Morisaki et al. We adopt a resource state cost model based on the magic-state catalysis approach of Gidney and Fowler (arXiv:1812.01238). On Haar-random targets synthesized to precisions ranging from ε=10−3 to 10−8, the cost of Clifford+T circuits scales as 2.4log2(1/ε) compared to 3.0log2(1/ε) for T-count-optimal Clifford+T circuits. Once a one-time catalyst state is amortized, the Clifford+T circuits are never costlier than their Clifford+T counterparts.