Rotation operations are essential ingredients in quantum algorithms. However, fault-tolerant quantum computation is intrinsically digital, based on a finite set of primitive gates, and thus cannot provide an analog rotation operation with arbitrary angles. It must resort to approximating a rotation operation using a basic universal gate set. Prior work on rotation synthesis either focuses on synthesizing individual rotations without considering a quantum circuit as a whole or is restricted to the specific quantum Fourier transform circuit. In this work, we develop a holistic and general approach to rotation synthesis, taking all rotation operations of a circuit into account for quantum cost minimization. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the state-of-the-art methods in reducing the cost of synthesized Quantum algorithms with rotation operations.
Clifford+T synthesis of rotation gates is an important routine in fault-tolerant quantum compilation. While Clifford+T synthesis is scalable, it has a high overhead of tens of T gates per rotation in practice, translating to high resource estimates for many fault-tolerant algorithms. However, these well-known results, including those using probabilistic mixtures [Quantum 7, 1208 (2023)], are independent of the rotation angle
θ, requiring
O(log1/δ) T gates. We show that it is possible to do much better for small angles, reducing the T cost to
O~(θ2/δ), and returning to existing
O(log1/δ) results in the worst case. This is particularly important since many algorithms, such as Trotterization, are dominated by small-angle rotations. Further, we perform a detailed theoretical and numerical study of quasi-probabilities, which can further reduce the total T cost of large circuits by orders of magnitude with only a small overhead in sample complexity. We also develop a scheme based on quasi-probability mixtures of Clifford+T fallback channels. We derive new
θ-dependent formulas that can be used for resource estimation of fault-tolerant quantum algorithms. As an application of our results, we show that the gate cost of Trotterization circuits compiled to a Clifford+T gate set is constant in the small Trotter step size limit, and can be reduced by orders of magnitude even for large step sizes. The cost of fault-tolerant Trotterization for a variety of applications should be re-examined in light of these results. Our work dispels the widely-stated claim that Clifford+T rotation synthesis has a high cost independent of
θ, and further develops a scalable quasi-probability method for rotation synthesis. We also expect our results to bring forward useful early fault-tolerant quantum computing by reducing required magic state resources.
For universal quantum computation, a major challenge to overcome for practical implementation is the large amount of resources required for fault-tolerant quantum information processing. An important aspect is implementing arbitrary unitary operators built from logical gates within the quantum error correction code. A synthesis algorithm can be used to approximate any unitary gate up to arbitrary precision by assembling sequences of logical gates chosen from a small set of universal gates that are fault-tolerantly performable while encoded in a quantum error-correction code. However, current procedures do not yet support individual assignment of base gate costs and many do not support extended sets of universal base gates. We analysed cost-optimal sequences using an exhaustive search based on Dijkstra’s pathfinding algorithm for the canonical Clifford+ T set of base gates and compared them to when additionally including Z -rotations from higher orders of the Clifford hierarchy. Two approaches of assigning base gate costs were used. First, costs were reduced to T -counts by recursively applying a Z -rotation catalyst circuit. Second, costs were assigned as the average numbers of raw (i.e. physical level) magic states required to directly distil and implement the gates fault-tolerantly. We found that the average sequence cost decreases by up to 54±3% when using the Z -rotation catalyst circuit approach and by up to 33±2% when using the magic state distillation approach. In addition, we investigated observed limitations of certain assignments of base gate costs by developing an analytic model to estimate the proportion of sets of Z -rotation gates from higher orders of the Clifford hierarchy that are found within sequences approximating random target gates.
Preparing arbitrary logical states is a central primitive for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation and the cost of encoded-state preparation contributes directly to the overall resource overhead. This makes the synthesis of efficient general-state encoding circuits an important problem, particularly with respect to two-qubit gate count and circuit depth. Yet the synthesis of such encoders has been studied less extensively than general Clifford circuit synthesis or the preparation of specific logical Pauli-eigenstates. In this work, we develop methods for synthesizing efficient encoders for arbitrary stabilizer codes. We formulate encoder synthesis as a search over stabilizer tableaus and introduce greedy and rollout-based algorithms that exploit the freedom among stabilizer-equivalent realizations of the same encoding isometry. For code families with a modular structure, such as generalized concatenated and holographic codes, we show how large encoders can be assembled from optimized local constituent encoders, and we use SMT-based exact synthesis to obtain optimal local circuits for small instances. We further evaluate the proposed methods on a broad set of stabilizer codes, including holographic and quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, and compare them against recent encoder-synthesis methods and existing constructions from the literature, obtaining improvements of up to 43% in two-qubit gate count and up to 70% in depth. Our results support the optimization of encoded-state preparation in several fault-tolerant quantum-computing schemes, and all methods are openly available as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit.
We investigate resource requirements for a fault-tolerant quantum Fourier transform. The quantum Fourier transform is a basic subroutine for quantum algorithms which provide an exponential speedup over known classical ones, such as Shor's algorithm for factoring. To implement single-qubit rotations required for a quantum Fourier transform in a fault-tolerant manner, we consider two types of approaches: gate synthesis and state distillation. While the gate synthesis approximates single-qubit rotations with basic quantum operations, the state distillation allows one to perform single-qubit rotations for a quantum Fourier transform exactly. It is unknown, however, which approach is better for a quantum Fourier transform. Here we develop a state-distillation method optimized for a quantum Fourier transform and compare this performance with those of state-of-the-art techniques for gate synthesis without and with ancillary states (ancillas). The performance is evaluated with the resource requirement for a quantum Fourier transform. The resource is measured by the total number of $\ensuremath{\pi}/8$ gates denoted by
T, which is called the
T count. Contrary to the expectation, the
T count for the state distillation is considerably larger than those for the ancilla-free and ancilla-assisted gate synthesis. Thus, we conclude that the ancilla-assisted gate synthesis is a better approach to a fault-tolerant quantum Fourier transform.
Efficient constructions for quantum logic are essential since quantum computation is experimentally challenging. This thesis develops quantum logic synthesis as a paradigm for reducing the resource overhead in fault-tolerant quantum computing. The model for error correction considered here is the surface code. After developing the theory behind general logic synthesis, the resource costs of magic-state distillation for the
T=exp(iπ(I−Z)/8) gate are quantitatively analyzed. The resource costs for a relatively new protocol distilling multi-qubit Fourier states are calculated for the first time. Four different constructions of the fault-tolerant Toffoli gate, including two which incorporate error detection, are analyzed and compared. The techniques of logic synthesis reduce the cost of fault-tolerant quantum computation by one to two orders of magnitude, depending on which benchmark is used. Using resource analysis for
T gates and Toffoli gates, several proposals for constructing arbitrary quantum gates are compared, including "Clifford+
T" sequences,
V-basis sequences, phase kickback, and programmable ancilla rotations. The application of arbitrary gates to quantum algorithms for simulating chemistry is discussed as well. Finally, the thesis examines the techniques which lead to efficient constructions of quantum logic, and these observations point to even broader applications of logic synthesis.
We conduct a systematic study of quantum circuits composed of multiple-control
Z-rotation (mczr) gates as primitives, since they are widely used components in quantum algorithms and also have attracted much experimental interest in recent years. We establish a circuit-polynomial correspondence to characterize the functionality of quantum circuits over the mczr gate set with continuous parameters. An analytic method for exactly synthesizing such quantum circuit to implement any given diagonal unitary matrix with an optimal gate count is proposed, which also enables the circuit depth optimal for specific cases with pairs of complementary gates. Furthermore, we present a gate-exchange strategy together with a flexible iterative algorithm for effectively optimizing the depth of any mczr circuit, which can also be applied to quantum circuits over any other commuting gate set. Besides the theoretical investigation, the practical performance of our circuit synthesis and optimization techniques is further evaluated numerically on two typical examples in quantum computing, including diagonal Hermitian operators and quantum approximate optimization algorithm circuits with tens of qubits, which can demonstrate a reduction in circuit depth by 33.40% and 15.55% on average over relevant prior works, respectively. Therefore, our methods and results provide a pathway for implementing quantum circuits and algorithms on recently developed devices.