English

Symbolic Reasoning about Quantum Circuits in Coq

Programming Languages 2021-12-22 v4 Logic in Computer Science Quantum Physics

Abstract

A quantum circuit is a computational unit that transforms an input quantum state to an output one. A natural way to reason about its behavior is to compute explicitly the unitary matrix implemented by it. However, when the number of qubits increases, the matrix dimension grows exponentially and the computation becomes intractable. In this paper, we propose a symbolic approach to reasoning about quantum circuits. It is based on a small set of laws involving some basic manipulations on vectors and matrices. This symbolic reasoning scales better than the explicit one and is well suited to be automated in Coq, as demonstrated with some typical examples.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.11023,
  title  = {Symbolic Reasoning about Quantum Circuits in Coq},
  author = {Wenjun Shi and Qinxiang Cao and Yuxin Deng and Hanru Jiang and Yuan Feng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.11023},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.02648 by other authors

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:43:59.226Z