Solovay-Kitaev Decomposition Strategy for Single-Qubit Channels

Inspired by the Solovay-Kitaev decomposition for approximating unitary operations as a sequence of operations selected from a universal quantum computing gate set, we introduce a method for approximating any single-qubit channel using single-qubit gates and the controlled-NOT (CNOT). Our approach uses the decomposition of the single-qubit channel into a convex combination of "quasiextreme" channels. Previous techniques for simulating general single-qubit channels would require as many as 20 CNOT gates, whereas ours only needs one, bringing it within the range of current experiments

Quantum Fourier Addition, Simplified to Toffoli Addition

Quantum addition circuits are considered being of two types: 1) Toffolli-adder circuits which use only classical reversible gates (CNOT and Toffoli), and 2) QFT-adder circuits based on the quantum Fourier transformation. We present the first systematic translation of the QFT-addition circuit into a Toffoli-based adder. This result shows that QFT-addition has fundamentally the same fault-tolerance cost (e.g. T-count) as the most cost-efficient Toffoli-adder: instead of using approximate decompositions of the gates from the QFT circuit, it is more efficient to merge gates. In order to achieve this, we formulated novel circuit identities for multi-controlled gates and apply the identities algorithmically. The employed techniques can be used to automate quantum circuit optimisation heuristics.Comment: accepted in PR