English

Quantum Circuits for Isometries

Quantum Physics 2020-04-10 v4

Abstract

We consider the decomposition of arbitrary isometries into a sequence of single-qubit and Controlled-NOT (C-NOT) gates. In many experimental architectures, the C-NOT gate is relatively 'expensive' and hence we aim to keep the number of these as low as possible. We derive a theoretical lower bound on the number of C-NOT gates required to decompose an arbitrary isometry from m to n qubits, and give three explicit gate decompositions that achieve this bound up to a factor of about two in the leading order. We also perform some bespoke optimizations for certain cases where m and n are small. In addition, we show how to apply our result for isometries to give decomposition schemes for arbitrary quantum operations and POVMs via Stinespring's theorem. These results will have an impact on experimental efforts to build a quantum computer, enabling them to go further with the same resources.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.06911,
  title  = {Quantum Circuits for Isometries},
  author = {Raban Iten and Roger Colbeck and Ivan Kukuljan and Jonathan Home and Matthias Christandl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.06911},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10+11 pages, 4 tables, many circuits, v2: a new decomposition has been added, v3: minor changes, v4: small correction to the counts in Theorem 1, and updated numbering to match journal version. The decompositions in this work have now been implemented (see arXiv:1904.01072)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:14:22.400Z