Uniform superpositions over permutations play a central role in quantum error correction, cryptography, and combinatorial optimisation. We introduce a simple yet powerful quantisation of the classical Fisher-Yates shuffle, yielding a suite of efficient quantum algorithms for preparing such superpositions on composite registers. Our method replaces classical randomness with coherent control, enabling five variants that differ in their output structure and entanglement with ancillary systems. We demonstrate that this construction achieves the best known combination of asymptotic resources among all existing approaches, requiring only
O(nlog(n)) qubits and
O(n2log(n)) gates and circuit depth. These results position the quantum Fisher-Yates shuffle as a strong candidate for optimality within this class of algorithms. Our work unifies several prior constructions under a single, transparent framework and opens up new directions for quantum state preparation using classical combinatorial insights. Our implementation in Qiskit is available as open-source code, supporting reproducibility and future exploration of quantum permutation-based algorithms.
Abstract The parallel computing power of quantum computing and the special properties of qubits provide an effective solution for image processing tasks. This paper presents a quantum image encryption algorithm based on Fisher-Yates algorithm and Logistic mapping. Firstly, the Fisher-Yates algorithm is used to generate three key sequences, one of which is used to encode the coordinate qubits of the image. Using the other two keys and the preset rules, the quantum coordinate scrambling operation is designed based on the encoded coordinate qubit, which effectively scrambles the spatial information of the plaintext image. Next, another set of key sequences is generated, one of which is used to encode the color qubits of the image. Using two other key sequences and different rules, a qubit plane scrambling operation based on coded color qubits is designed, and the color information of image is scrambled successfully. Finally, the quantum key image is generated based on Logistic mapping, and the key image is scrambled based on Fisher-Yates algorithm to improve the key complexity. The final ciphertext image is obtained by performing XOR operation between the original image and the scrambled key image. The complete quantum circuit diagram of the scheme is given in this paper. The experimental results and security analysis prove the effectiveness of the scheme, which provides a large key space and the computational complexity is only O(n).