The quantum Fourier transform (QFT) is a key primitive for quantum computing that is typically used as a subroutine within a larger computation, for instance for phase estimation. As such, we may have little control over the state that is input to the QFT. Thus, in implementing a good QFT, we may imagine that it needs to perform well on arbitrary input states. Verifying this worst-case correct behaviour of a QFT-implementation would be exponentially hard (in the number of qubits) in general, raising the concern that this verification would be impossible in practice on any useful-sized system. In this paper we show that, in fact, we only need to have good average-case performance of the QFT to achieve good worst-case performance for key tasks – phase estimation, period finding and amplitude estimation. Further we give a very efficient procedure to verify this required average-case behaviour of the QFT.
Quantum phase estimation~(QPE) is central to numerous quantum algorithms, yet its standard implementation demands an $\calO(m^{2})$-gate quantum Fourier transform~(QFT) on
m control qubits-a prohibitive overhead on near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We introduce the \emph{Phase-Fidelity-Aware Truncated QFT} (PFA-TQFT), a family of approximate QFT circuits parameterised by a truncation depth~
d that omits controlled-phase rotations below a hardware-calibrated fidelity threshold~$\eps$. Our central result establishes $\TV(P_{\varphi},P_{\varphi}^{d})\leqπ(m{-}d)/2^{d}$, showing that for $d=\calO(\log m)$ circuit size collapses from $\calO(m^{2})$ to $\calO(m\log m)$ while estimation error grows by at most $\calO(2^{-d})$. We characterise $\dstar=\Floor{\log_{2}(2π/\eps_{2q})}$ directly from native gate fidelities, demonstrating 31.3 -43.7\% at m = 30, gate-count reduction on IBM Eagle/Heron and IonQ~Aria with negligible accuracy loss. Numerical experiments on the transverse-field Ising model confirm all theoretical predictions and reveal a \emph{noise-truncation synergy}: PFA-TQFT outperforms full QFT under NISQ noise $\eps_{2q}\gtrsim 2\times10^{-3}$.
The Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) has an important role in some of the most interesting and useful quantum algorithms, such as those for period finding, order finding, phase estimation and factoring. Most of the research carried out on the QFT has been developed using software simulators, however these do not emulate efficiently the quantum parallelism present in the quantum algorithms. Addressing this problem, this paper presents the hardware design of an emulator for computing the QFT using FPGAs. This emulator was designed considering a modular philosophy and it is expected to be a powerful tool to evaluate quantum algorithms that include a many-qubit QFT.