A compiler for universal photonic quantum computers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compiler pipeline that converts quantum circuits into a measurement-graph for photonic one-way quantum computers, optimizing the process with ZX-Calculus for efficient execution on experimental platforms.

Contribution

It presents a novel method to translate QASM circuits into measurement-graphs and optimizes them for photonic quantum computing using ZX-Calculus.

Findings

Successful conversion of QASM to measurement-graph (m-graph)

Optimization of the graph with ZX-Calculus improves execution efficiency

Implementation demonstrated on an experimental photonic platform

Abstract

Photons are a natural resource in quantum information, and the last decade showed significant progress in high-quality single photon generation and detection. Furthermore, photonic qubits are easy to manipulate and do not require particularly strongly sealed environments, making them an appealing platform for quantum computing. With the one-way model, the vision of a universal and large-scale quantum computer based on photonics becomes feasible. In one-way computing, the input state is not an initial product state, but a so-called cluster state. A series of measurements on the cluster state's individual qubits and their temporal order, together with a feed-forward procedure, determine the quantum circuit to be executed. We propose a pipeline to convert a QASM circuit into a graph representation named measurement-graph (m-graph), that can be directly translated to hardware instructions on an optical one-way quantum computer. In addition, we optimize the graph using ZX-Calculus before evaluating the execution on an experimental discrete variable photonic platform.