Constructing quantum circuits with global gates

TL;DR

This paper develops efficient algorithms for transforming quantum circuits into forms compatible with native global gates, optimizing for ion trap quantum computers and reducing the number of required global interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to convert circuits with Clifford and phase gates into global gate-based circuits, and improves global gate synthesis efficiency for Clifford circuits.

Findings

Efficient algorithm for Clifford and phase gate circuit transformation.

Linear scaling method for targeting subsets of qubits with global gates.

Reduced global gate count for arbitrary n-qubit Clifford circuits.

Abstract

There are various gate sets that can be used to describe a quantum computation. A particularly popular gate set in the literature on quantum computing consists of arbitrary single-qubit gates and 2-qubit CNOT gates. A CNOT gate is however not always the natural multi-qubit interaction that can be implemented on a given physical quantum computer, necessitating a compilation step that transforms these CNOT gates to the native gate set. A particularly interesting case where compilation is necessary is for ion trap quantum computers, where the natural entangling operation can act on more than 2 qubits and can even act globally on all qubits at once. This calls for an entirely different approach to constructing efficient circuits. In this paper we study the problem of converting a given circuit that uses 2-qubit gates to one that uses global gates. Our three main contributions are as follows. First, we find an efficient algorithm for transforming an arbitrary circuit consisting of Clifford gates and arbitrary phase gates into a circuit consisting of single-qubit gates and a number of global interactions proportional to the number of non-Clifford phases present in the original circuit. Second, we find a general strategy to transform a global gate that targets all qubits into one that targets only a subset of the qubits. This approach scales linearly with the number of qubits that are not targeted, in contrast to the exponential scaling reported in (Maslov & Nam, N. J. Phys. 2018). Third, we improve on the number of global gates required to synthesise an arbitrary n-qubit Clifford circuit from the 12n-18 reported in (Maslov & Nam, N. J. Phys. 2018) to 6n-8.