English

An Efficient Quantum Compiler that reduces $T$ count

Quantum Physics 2018-06-08 v3

Abstract

Before executing a quantum algorithm, one must first decompose the algorithm into machine-level instructions compatible with the architecture of the quantum computer, a process known as quantum compiling. There are many different quantum circuit decompositions for the same algorithm but it is desirable to compile leaner circuits. A fundamentally important cost metric is the TT count -- the number of TT gates in a circuit. For the single qubit case, optimal compiling is essentially a solved problem. However, multi-qubit compiling is a harder problem with optimal algorithms requiring classical runtime exponential in the number of qubits. Here, we present and compare several efficient quantum compilers for multi-qubit Clifford + TT circuits. We implemented our compilers in C++ and benchmarked them on random circuits, from which we determine that our TODD compiler yields the lowest TT counts on average. We also benchmarked TODD on a library of reversible logic circuits that appear in quantum algorithms and found that it reduced the TT count for 97\% of the circuits with an average TT-count saving of 20\% when compared against the best of all previous circuit decompositions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.01557,
  title  = {An Efficient Quantum Compiler that reduces $T$ count},
  author = {Luke Heyfron and Earl T. Campbell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.01557},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Version 2: more comparison between different variants of compilers and more discussion of different cost metrics. Bug fixed in source code affecting circuits over 32 qubits

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:07:07.013Z