The synthesis of a quantum circuit
Alexis De Vos, Stijn De Baerdemacker · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2014
As two basic building blocks for any quantum circuit, we consider the 1-qubit NEGATOR(θ) circuit and the 1-qubit PHASOR(θ) circuit, extensions of the NOT gate and PHASE gate, respectively: NEGATOR(π) = NOT and PHASOR(π) = PHASE.Quantum circuits (acting on w qubits) consisting of controlled NEGATORs are represented by matrices from XU(2 w ); quantum circuits (acting on w qubits) consisting of controlled PHASORs are represented by matrices from ZU(2 w ).Here, XU(n) and ZU(n) are subgroups of the unitary group U(n): the group XU(n) consists of all n × n unitary matrices with all line sums equal to 1 and the group ZU(n) consists of all n × n unitary diagonal matrices with first entry equal to 1.We conjecture that any U(n) matrix can be decomposed into four parts: U = e iα Z1XZ2, where both Z1 and Z2 are ZU(n) matrices and X is an XU(n) matrix.For n = 2 w , this leads to a decomposition of a quantum computer into simpler blocks.