Quantum circuit synthesis is one of the major areas of current research in the field of quantum computing.Analogous to its Boolean counterpart, the task involves constructing arbitrary quantum gates using only those available within a small set of universal gates that can be realized physically.However, unlike the latter, there are an infinite number of single qubit quantum gates, all of which constitute the special unitary group SU(2).Realizing any given single qubit gate using a given universal gate family is a complex task.Although gates can be synthesized to arbitrary degree of precision as long as the set of finite strings of the gate family is a dense subset of SU(2), it is desirable to accomplish the highest level of precision using only the minimum number of universal gates within the string approximation.Almost all algorithms that have been proposed for this purpose are based on the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm.The crux of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm is the use of a procedure to decompose a given quantum gate into a pair of group commutators with the pair being synthesized separately.The Solovay-Kitaev algorithm involves group commutator decomposition in a recursive manner, with a direct approximation of a gate into a string of universal gates being performed only at the last level, i.e. in the leaf nodes of the search tree representing the execution of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm.The main contribution of this research is in integrating conventional optimization procedures within the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm.Two specific directions of research have been studied.Firstly, optimization is incorporated within the group commutator decomposition, so that a more optimal pair of group commutators are obtained.As the degree of precision of the synthesized gate is explicitly minimized by means of this optimization procedure, the enhanced algorithm allows for more accurate quantum gates to be synthesized than what the original Solovay-Kitaev algorithm achieves.Simulation results with random gates indicate that the obtained accuracy is an order of magnitude better than before.Two versions of the new algorithm are examined, with the optimization in the first version being invoked only at the bottom level of Solovay-Kitaev algorithm and when carried out across all levels of the search tree in the next.Extensive simulations show that the second version yields better results despite equivalent computation times.Theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm is able to provide a more formal, quantitative explanation underlying the experimentally observed phenomena.The other direction of investigation of this research involves formulating the group commutator decomposition in the form of bi-criteria optimization.This phase of research relaxed the equality constraint in the previous approach and with relaxation, a bi-criteria optimization is proposed.This optimization algorithm is new and has been devised primarily when the objective needs to be relaxed in different stages.This bi-criteria approach is able to provide comparably accurate synthesis as the previous approach.
Quantum circuit synthesis is one of the major areas of current research in the field of quantum computing.Analogous to its Boolean counterpart, the task involves constructing arbitrary quantum gates using only those available within a small set of universal gates that can be realized physically.However, unlike the latter, there are an infinite number of single qubit quantum gates, all of which constitute the special unitary group SU(2).Realizing any given single qubit gate using a given universal gate family is a complex task.Although gates can be synthesized to arbitrary degree of precision as long as the set of finite strings of the gate family is a dense subset of SU(2), it is desirable to accomplish the highest level of precision using only the minimum number of universal gates within the string approximation.Almost all algorithms that have been proposed for this purpose are based on the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm.The crux of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm is the use of a procedure to decompose a given quantum gate into a pair of group commutators with the pair being synthesized separately.The Solovay-Kitaev algorithm involves group commutator decomposition in a recursive manner, with a direct approximation of a gate into a string of universal gates being performed only at the last level, i.e. in the leaf nodes of the search tree representing the execution of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm.The main contribution of this research is in integrating conventional optimization procedures within the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm.Two specific directions of research have been studied.Firstly, optimization is incorporated within the group commutator decomposition, so that a more optimal pair of group commutators are obtained.As the degree of precision of the synthesized gate is explicitly minimized by means of this optimization procedure, the enhanced algorithm allows for more accurate quantum gates to be synthesized than what the original Solovay-Kitaev algorithm achieves.Simulation results with random gates indicate that the obtained accuracy is an order of magnitude better than before.Two versions of the new algorithm are examined, with the optimization in the first version being invoked only at the bottom level of Solovay-Kitaev algorithm and when carried out across all levels of the search tree in the next.Extensive simulations show that the second version yields better results despite equivalent computation times.Theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm is able to provide a more formal, quantitative explanation underlying the experimentally observed phenomena.The other direction of investigation of this research involves formulating the group commutator decomposition in the form of bi-criteria optimization.This phase of research relaxed the equality constraint in the previous approach and with relaxation, a bi-criteria optimization is proposed.This optimization algorithm is new and has been devised primarily when the objective needs to be relaxed in different stages.This bi-criteria approach is able to provide comparably accurate synthesis as the previous approach.
The Solovay-Kitaev algorithm is a fundamental result in quantum computation. It gives an algorithm for efficiently compiling arbitrary unitaries using universal gate sets: any unitary can be approximated by short gates sequences, whose length scales merely poly-logarithmically with accuracy. As a consequence, the choice of gate set is typically unimportant in quantum computing. However, the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm requires the gate set to be inverse-closed. It has been a longstanding open question if efficient algorithmic compilation is possible without this condition. In this work, we provide the first inverse-free Solovay-Kitaev algorithm, which makes no assumption on the structure within a gate set beyond universality, answering this problem in the affirmative, and providing an efficient compilation algorithm in the absence of inverses for both SU(d) and SL(d,C). The algorithm works by showing that approximate gate implementations of the generalized Pauli group can self-correct their errors.
Quantum circuit synthesis is the process in which an arbitrary unitary operation is decomposed into a sequence of gates from a universal set, typically one which a quantum computer can implement both efficiently and fault-tolerantly. As physical implementations of quantum computers improve, the need is growing for tools that can effectively synthesize components of the circuits and algorithms they will run. Existing algorithms for exact, multi-qubit circuit synthesis scale exponentially in the number of qubits and circuit depth, leaving synthesis intractable for circuits on more than a handful of qubits. Even modest improvements in circuit synthesis procedures may lead to significant advances, pushing forward the boundaries of not only the size of solvable circuit synthesis problems, but also in what can be realized physically as a result of having more efficient circuits. We present a method for quantum circuit synthesis using deterministic walks. Also termed pseudorandom walks, these are walks in which once a starting point is chosen, its path is completely determined. We apply our method to construct a parallel framework for circuit synthesis, and implement one such version performing optimal T -count synthesis over the Clifford+ T gate set. We use our software to present examples where parallelization offers a significant speedup on the runtime, as well as directly confirm that the 4-qubit 1-bit full adder has optimal T -count 7 and T -depth 3.
Quantum computation is of current ubiquitous interest in physics, computer science, and the public interest. In the not-so-distant future, quantum computers will be relatively common pieces of research equipment. Eventually, one can expect an actively quantum computer to be a common feature of life. In this work, I study the approximation efficiency of several common universal quantum gate sets at short sequence lengths using an implementation of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm. I begin by developing from almost nothing the relevant formal mathematics to rigorously describe what one means by the terms universal gate set and covering efficiency. I then describe some interesting results on the asymptotic covering properties of certain classes of universal gate sets and discuss the theorem which the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm is based on. Moving from mathematical introduction to experimental method, I then describe how sets will be compared. I use the commonly studied sets H+T, Pauli+V, V, and Clifford+T to determine which is the most efficient at approximating randomly generated unitaries. By doing so, we get an understanding of how well each set would perform in the context of a general quantum computer processor. This was accomplished by using the same implementation of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm throughout, with roughly equal-sized preprocessed libraries formed from each gate set, over approximations for 10,000 randomly generated unitary matrices at algorithm depth n=5. Ultimately, the Pauli+V and V sets were the most efficient and had similar performance qualities. On average the Pauli+V set produced approximations of length 15,491 and accuracy 0.0002686. The V basis produced approximations of average sequence length 16,403 and accuracy 0.0001465. This performance is about equal given this particular implementation of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm. We conclude that this result is somewhat surprising as the general behavior and efficiency of these particular choices of gate set are expected to be similar. It is possible though that the asymptotic efficiencies of these gate sets vary by a relatively wide margin and this has effected the experiment. It is also possible that some aspect of a naive implementation of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm resulted in the Hadamard gate based sets performing more poorly than the V basis sets overall. Due to constraints on computational power, this result could also be limited to this particular accuracy regime and could even out as tolerance 𝜀 is taken to be arbitrarily small. Further possibilities of this result as well as further work are then discussed.
A central problem in realizing universal quantum computers is dealing with decoherence effects, which can destroy the vulnerable quantum states present in the internal registers. Several schemes have been developed that provide resistance to decoherence, leading to theories of fault-tolerant quantum computation. One such scheme is the theory of topological quantum computation, which encodes qubit states in robust topological properties of certain quantum systems. However, fault-tolerant theories typically only provide a finite set of primitive gates, from which we must then form approximations to arbitrary quantum gates. The Solovay-Kitaev algorithm describes a procedure for accomplishing this, and proves that the number of primitive gates required to approximate an arbitrary gate is only polylogarithmic in the desired degree of accuracy. In this thesis, we first outline the basic theory of quantum computation. Secondly, we describe the general problem of quantum compilation, list several possible strategies for relevant optimizations, and outline a proof of the Solovay-Kitaev theorem. Next, we give an introduction to the theory of topological quantum computation by anyons, with special focus on Fibonacci-anyons. Finally, we list some numerical results of an implementation of the Solovay-Kitaev algorithm when applied to a Fibonacci-anyon model and analyze the performance gains obtained through applications of the proposed optimizations.
In this article, we present a novel method for synthesizing quantum circuits from user-supplied components. Given input-output state vectors and component quantum gates, our synthesizer aims to construct a quantum circuit that implements the provided functionality in terms of the supplied component gates. To achieve this, we basically use an enumerative search with pruning. To accelerate the procedure, however, we perform the search and pruning at the module level; instead of simply enumerating candidate circuits by appending component gates in sequence, we stack modules, which are groups of gate operations. With this modular approach, we can effectively reduce the search space by directing the search in a way that bridges the gap between the current circuit and the input-output specification. Evaluation on 17 benchmark problems shows that our technique is highly effective at synthesizing quantum circuits. Our method successfully synthesized 16 out of 17 benchmark circuits in 96.6 seconds on average. On the other hand, the conventional, gate-level synthesis algorithm succeeded in 10 problems with an average time of 639.1 seconds. Our algorithm increased the speed of the baseline by 20.3x for the 10 problems commonly solved by both approaches.
The current phase of quantum computing is in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. On NISQ devices, two-qubit gates such as CNOTs are much noisier than single-qubit gates, so it is essential to minimize their count. Quantum circuit synthesis is a process of decomposing an arbitrary unitary into a sequence of quantum gates, and can be used as an optimization tool to produce shorter circuits to improve overall circuit fidelity. However, the time-to-solution of synthesis grows exponentially with the number of qubits. As a result, synthesis is intractable for circuits on a large qubit scale. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical, block-by-block optimization framework, QGo, for quantum circuit optimization. Our approach allows an exponential cost optimization to scale to large circuits. QGo uses a combination of partitioning and synthesis: 1) partition the circuit into a sequence of independent circuit blocks; 2) re-generate and optimize each block using quantum synthesis; and 3) re-compose the final circuit by stitching all the blocks together. We perform our analysis and show the fidelity improvements in three different regimes: small-size circuits on real devices, medium-size circuits on noise simulations, and large-size circuits on analytical models. Using a set of NISQ benchmarks, we show that QGo can reduce the number of CNOT gates by 29.9% on average and up to 50% when compared with industrial compilers such as t|ket>. When executed on the IBM Athens system, shorter depth leads to higher circuit fidelity. We also demonstrate the scalability of our QGo technique to optimize circuits of 60+ qubits. Our technique is the first demonstration of successfully employing and scaling synthesis in the compilation toolchain for large circuits. Overall, our approach is robust for direct incorporation in production compiler toolchains.