A popular universal gate set for quantum computing with qubits is Clifford+T, as this can be readily implemented on many fault-tolerant architectures. For qutrits, there is an equivalent T gate, that, like its qubit analogue, makes Clifford+T approximately universal, is injectable by a magic state, and supports magic state distillation. However, it was claimed that a better gate set for qutrits might be Clifford+R, where R=diag(1,1,-1) is the metaplectic gate, as certain protocols and gates could more easily be implemented using the R gate than the T gate. In this paper we show that when we have at least two qutrits, the qutrit Clifford+R unitaries form a strict subset of the Clifford+T unitaries, by finding a direct decomposition of
R⊗I as a Clifford+T circuit and proving that the T gate cannot be exactly synthesized in Clifford+R. This shows that in fact the T gate is at least as powerful as the R gate, up to a constant factor. Moreover, we additionally show that it is impossible to find a single-qutrit Clifford+T decomposition of the R gate, making our result tight.
We present an exact synthesis algorithm for qutrit unitaries in
U3n(Z[1/3,e2πi/3]) over the Clifford
+T gate set with at most one ancilla. This extends the already known result of qutrit metaplectic gates being a subset of Clifford
+T gate set with one ancilla. As an intermediary step, we construct an algorithm to convert 3-level unitaries into multiply-controlled gates, analogous to Gray codes converting 2-level unitaries into multiply-controlled gates. Finally, using catalytic embeddings, we present an algorithm to exactly synthesize unitaries
U3n(Z[1/3,e2πi/9]) over the Clifford
+T gate set with at most 2 ancillas. This, in particular, gives an exact synthesis algorithm of single-qutrit Clifford
+D over the multi-qutrit Clifford
+T gate set with at most two ancillas.
We develop an angular momentum representation and implementation of the Clifford+T set of unitaries for qutrits. We show that local gates from this set can be realized by the sole use of suitable rotations and one-axis-twisting operations, which are at most quadratic in the angular momentum operators and thus can be experimentally realized in many quantum systems. Controlled rotations are shown to only require linear angular momentum couplings and, as a consequence, the full qutrit Clifford+T set is shown to be expressed solely in terms of two-body angular momentum couplings, rotations and one-axis-twisting operations. By employing the Jordan-Schwinger map, we show an analogous implementation in terms of bosonic modes, improving on the number of modes with regard to a previous scheme. Moreover, we employ the cross-Kerr interaction in order to obtain any qutrit Clifford+T gate for bosonic modes. We illustrate our findings with simple schemes for preparing entangled states of interest.