Low-overhead constructions for the fault-tolerant Toffoli gate
Cody Jones · Physical Review A · 2013
We present two 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 $T=\mathrm{exp}(i\ensuremath{\pi}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{z}/8)$ 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 ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{z}$ error occurring with probability $p$ in any one of eight $T$ gates required to produce the Toffoli gate. By postselecting 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 $28{p}^{2}$ 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.