Novel constructions for the fault-tolerant Toffoli gate

TL;DR

This paper introduces two innovative quantum circuit constructions for the Toffoli gate that significantly reduce resource costs and enable error detection, thereby lowering overhead in fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Contribution

The paper presents a resource-efficient Toffoli gate requiring fewer $T$ gates and a fault-detection circuit that suppresses error probability, advancing fault-tolerant quantum computing methods.

Findings

Toffoli gate with only four $T$ gates and Clifford operations.

Error detection circuit reduces error probability from linear to quadratic in $p$.

Resource overhead for logical Toffoli gates is decreased by an order of magnitude.

Abstract

We present two new constructions for the Toffoli gate which substantially reduce resource costs in fault-tolerant quantum computing. The first contribution is a Toffoli gate requiring Clifford operations plus only four $T = \exp(i\pi\sigma^z/8)$ gates, whereas conventional circuits require seven $T$ gates. An extension of this result is that adding $n$ control inputs to a controlled gate requires $4n$ $T$ gates, whereas the best prior result was $8n$. The second contribution is a quantum circuit for the Toffoli gate which can detect a single $\sigma^z$ error occurring with probability $p$ in any one of eight $T$ gates required to produce the Toffoli. By post-selecting circuits that did not detect an error, the posterior error probability is suppressed to lowest order from $4p$ (or $7p$, without the first contribution) to $28p^2$ for this enhanced construction. In fault-tolerant quantum computing, this construction can reduce the overhead for producing logical Toffoli gates by an order of magnitude.