Synthesis and Arithmetic of Single Qutrit Circuits

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical framework for synthesizing single qutrit quantum circuits using Clifford$+D$ gates, characterizing vectors and solving quadratic forms to enable exact gate synthesis and extending methods to higher-dimensional qudits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to analyze and synthesize qutrit circuits with Clifford$+D$ gates, including characterizations of vectors and a reduction to quadratic form solutions.

Findings

Characterization of qutrit vectors with specific denominator exponents.

Reduction of synthesis problem to solving positive definite quadratic forms.

Extension of methods to arbitrary prime power qudits.

Abstract

In this paper we study single qutrit circuits consisting of words over the Clifford$+D$ cyclotomic gate set, where $D=\text{diag}(\pm\xi^{a},\pm\xi^{b},\pm\xi^{c})$, $\xi$ is a primitive $9$-th root of unity and $a,b,c$ are integers. We characterize classes of qutrit unit vectors $z$ with entries in $\mathbb{Z}[\xi, \frac{1}{\chi}]$ based on the possibility of reducing their smallest denominator exponent (sde) with respect to $\chi := 1 - \xi,$ by acting an appropriate gate in Clifford$+D$. We do this by studying the notion of `derivatives mod $3$' of an arbitrary element of $\mathbb{Z}[\xi]$ and using it to study the smallest denominator exponent of $HDz$ where $H$ is the qutrit Hadamard gate and $D$. In addition, we reduce the problem of finding all unit vectors of a given sde to that of finding integral solutions of a positive definite quadratic form along with some additional constraints. As a consequence we prove that the Clifford$+D$ gates naturally arise as gates with sde $0$ and $3$ in the group $U(3,\mathbb{Z}[\xi, \frac{1}{\chi}])$ of $3 \times 3$ unitaries with entries in $\mathbb{Z}[\xi, \frac{1}{\chi}]$. We illustrate the general applicability of these methods to obtain an exact synthesis algorithm for Clifford$+R$ and recover the previous exact synthesis algorithm in \cite{kmm}. The framework developed to formulate qutrit gate synthesis for Clifford$+D$ extends to qudits of arbitrary prime power.