Basics of quantum computation

Quantum computers require quantum logic, something fundamentally different to classical Boolean logic. This difference leads to a greater efficiency of quantum computation over its classical counter-part. In this review we explain the basic principles of quantum computation, including the construction of basic gates, and networks. We illustrate the power of quantum algorithms using the simple problem of Deutsch, and explain, again in very simple terms, the well known algorithm of Shor for factorisation of large numbers into primes. We then describe physical implementations of quantum computers, focusing on one in particular, the linear ion-trap realization. We explain that the main obstacle to building an actual quantum computer is the problem of decoherence, which we show may be circumvented using the methods of quantum error correction.Comment: 28 pages including 17 figures, invited basic review article for Progress in Quantum Electronic

Hybrid quantum computing with ancillas

In the quest to build a practical quantum computer, it is important to use efficient schemes for enacting the elementary quantum operations from which quantum computer programs are constructed. The opposing requirements of well-protected quantum data and fast quantum operations must be balanced to maintain the integrity of the quantum information throughout the computation. One important approach to quantum operations is to use an extra quantum system - an ancilla - to interact with the quantum data register. Ancillas can mediate interactions between separated quantum registers, and by using fresh ancillas for each quantum operation, data integrity can be preserved for longer. This review provides an overview of the basic concepts of the gate model quantum computer architecture, including the different possible forms of information encodings - from base two up to continuous variables - and a more detailed description of how the main types of ancilla-mediated quantum operations provide efficient quantum gates.Comment: Review paper. An introduction to quantum computation with qudits and continuous variables, and a review of ancilla-based gate method

RESOURCE EFFICIENT DESIGN OF QUANTUM CIRCUITS FOR CRYPTANALYSIS AND SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING APPLICATIONS

Quantum computers offer the potential to extend our abilities to tackle computational problems in fields such as number theory, encryption, search and scientific computation. Up to a superpolynomial speedup has been reported for quantum algorithms in these areas. Motivated by the promise of faster computations, the development of quantum machines has caught the attention of both academics and industry researchers. Quantum machines are now at sizes where implementations of quantum algorithms or their components are now becoming possible. In order to implement quantum algorithms on quantum machines, resource efficient circuits and functional blocks must be designed. In this work, we propose quantum circuits for Galois and integer arithmetic. These quantum circuits are necessary building blocks to realize quantum algorithms. The design of resource efficient quantum circuits requires the designer takes into account the gate cost, quantum bit (qubit) cost, depth and garbage outputs of a quantum circuit. Existing quantum machines do not have many qubits meaning that circuits with high qubit cost cannot be implemented. In addition, quantum circuits are more prone to errors and garbage output removal adds to overall cost. As more gates are used, a quantum circuit sees an increased rate of failure. Failures and error rates can be countered by using quantum error correcting codes and fault tolerant implementations of universal gate sets (such as Clifford+T gates). However, Clifford+T gates are costly to implement with the T gate being significantly more costly than the Clifford gates. As a result, designers working with Clifford+T gates seek to minimize the number of T gates (T-count) and the depth of T gates (T-depth). In this work, we propose quantum circuits for Galois and integer arithmetic with lower T-count, T-depth and qubit cost than existing work. This work presents novel quantum circuits for squaring and exponentiation over binary extension fields (Galois fields of form GF(2 m )). The proposed circuits are shown to have lower depth, qubit and gate cost to existing work. We also present quantum circuits for the core operations of multiplication and division which enjoy lower T-count, T-depth and qubit costs compared to existing work. This work also illustrates the design of a T-count and qubit cost efficient design for the square root. This work concludes with an illustration of how the arithmetic circuits can be combined into a functional block to implement quantum image processing algorithms

Design and Synthesis of Efficient Circuits for Quantum Computers

Οι πρόσφατες εξελίξεις στον τομέα της πειραματικής κατασκευής κβαντικών υπολογιστών με εξαρτήματα αυξημένης αξιοπιστίας δείχνει ότι η κατασκευή τέτοιων μεγάλων μηχανών βασισμένων στις αρχές της κβαντικής φυσικής είναι πιθανή στο κοντινό μέλλον. Καθώς το μέγεθος των μελλοντικών κβαντικών υπολογιστών θα αυξάνεται, η σχεδίαση αποδοτικότερων κβαντικών κυκλωμάτων και μεθόδων σχεδίασης θα αποκτήσει σταδιακά πρακτικό ενδιαφέρον. Η συνεισφορά της διατριβής στην κατεύθυνση της σχεδίασης αποδοτικών κβαντικών κυκλωμάτων είναι διττή: Η πρώτη είναι η σχεδίαση καινοτόμων αποδοτικών αριθμητικών κβαντικών κυκλωμάτων βασισμένων στον Κβαντικό Μετασχηματισμό Fourier (QFT), όπως πολλαπλασιαστής-με-σταθερά-συσσωρευτής (MAC) και διαιρέτης με σταθερά, με γραμμικό βάθος (ή ταχύτητα) ως προς τον αριθμό ψηφίων των ακεραίων. Αυτά τα κυκλώματα συνδυάζονται αποτελεσματικά ώστε να επιτελέσουν την πράξη του modulo πολλαπλασιασμού με σταθερά με γραμμική πολυπλοκότητα χρόνου και χώρου και συνεπώς μπορούν να επιτελέσουν την πράξη της modulo εκθετικοποίησης (modular exponentiation) με τετραγωνική πολυπλοκότητα χρόνου και γραμμική πολυπλοκότητα χώρου. Οι πράξεις της modulo εκθετικοποίησης και του modulo πολλαπλασιασμού είναι αναπόσπαστα μέρη του σημαντικού κβαντικού αλγορίθμου παραγοντοποίησης του Shor, αλλά και άλλων κβαντικών αλγορίθμων της ίδιας οικογένειας, γνωστών ως κβαντική εκτίμηση φάσης (Quantum Phase Estimation). Αντιμετωπίζονται με αποτελεσματικό τρόπο σημαντικά προβλήματα υλοποίησης, που σχετίζονται με την απαίτηση χρήσης κβαντικών πυλών περιστροφής υψηλής ακρίβειας, καθώς και της χρήσης τοπικών επικοινωνιών. Η δεύτερη συνεισφορά της διατριβής είναι μία γενική μεθοδολογία ιεραρχικής σύνθεσης κβαντικών και αντιστρέψιμων κυκλωμάτων αυθαίρετης πολυπλοκότητας και μεγέθους. Η ιεραρχική μέθοδος σύνθεσης χειρίζεται καλύτερα μεγάλα κυκλώματα σε σχέση με τις επίπεδες μεθόδους σύνθεσης. Η προτεινόμενη μέθοδος προσφέρει πλεονεκτήματα σε σχέση με τις συνήθεις ιεραρχικές συνθέσεις που χρησιμοποιούν την μέθοδο "υπολογισμός-αντιγραφή-αντίστροφος υπολογισμός" του Bennett.The recent advances in the field of experimental construction of quantum computers with increased fidelity components shows that large-scale machines based on the principles of quantum physics are likely to be realized in the near future. As the size of the future quantum computers will be increased, efficient quantum circuits and design methods will gradually gain practical interest. The contribution of this thesis towards the design of efficient quantum circuits is two-fold. The first is the design of novel efficient quantum arithmetic circuits based on the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), like multiplier-with-constant-and-accumulator (MAC) and divider by constant, both of linear depth (or speed) with respect with the bits number of the integer operands. These circuits are effectively combined so as they can perform modular multiplication by constant in linear depth and space and consequently modular exponentiation in quadratic time and linear space. Modular exponentiation and modular multiplication operations are integral parts of the important quantum factorization algorithm of Shor and other quantum algorithms of the same family, known as Quantum Phase Estimation algorithms. Important implementation problems like the required high accuracy of the employed rotation quantum gates and the local communications between the gates are effectively addressed. The second contribution of this thesis is a generic hierarchical synthesis methodology for arbitrary complex and large quantum and reversible circuits. The methodology can handle more easily larger circuits relative to the flat synthesis methods. The proposed method offers advantages over the standard hierarchical synthesis which uses Bennett's method of "compute-copy-uncompute"

Unitary transformations for quantum computing

The last two decades have seen an enormous increase in the computational power of digital computers. This was due to the rapid technical development in manufacturing processes and controlling semiconducting structures on submicron scale. Concurrently, the electric circuits have encountered the first signs of the realm of quantum mechanics. Those effects may induce noise and thus they are typically considered harmful. However, the manipulation of the coherent quantum states might turn out be the basis of powerful computers – quantum computers. There, the computation is encoded into the unitary time evolution of a quantum mechanical state vector. Eventually, quantum mechanics could enable one, for example, to read secret electronic messages which are encrypted by the widely employed RSA cryptosystem – a task which is extremely laborious for the current digital computers. This thesis presents a theoretical study of the coherent manipulations of pure quantum states in a quantum register, that is, quantum algorithms. An implementation of a quantum algorithm involves the initialization of the input state and its manipulation with quantum gates followed by the measurements. The physical implementation of each gate requires that it is decomposed into low-level gates whose physical realizations are explicitly known. Here, the problem is examined from two directions. Firstly, the numerical optimization scheme for controlling time-evolution of a closed quantum system is discussed. This yields a method for implementing quantum gates acting on up to three quantum bits, qubits. The approach is independent of the physical realization of the quantum computer, but it is considered explicitly for a proposed inductively coupled Josephson charge qubit register. Secondly, the techniques of numerical matrix computation are utilized to find a general method for decomposing an arbitrary n-qubit gate into a sequence of elementary gates, which act on one or two qubits. The results of this thesis help to improve the implementation of quantum algorithms. The quantum circuit construction developed in the thesis is the first one to achieve the asymptotically minimal complexity in the number of elementary gates. In context of acceleration of quantum algorithms we present a gate-level study of Shor's algorithm and show how to accelerate the algorithm by merging several elementary gates into multiqubit gates. Finally, the requirements set by the resulting gate array are compared to the properties of superconducting qubits. This allows us to discuss the feasibility of the Josephson charge qubit register, for instance, as hardware for breaking the RSA cryptosystem.reviewe

Scheme for constructing graphs associated with stabilizer quantum codes

We propose a systematic scheme for the construction of graphs associated with binary stabilizer codes. The scheme is characterized by three main steps: first, the stabilizer code is realized as a codeword-stabilized (CWS) quantum code; second, the canonical form of the CWS code is uncovered; third, the input vertices are attached to the graphs. To check the effectiveness of the scheme, we discuss several graphical constructions of various useful stabilizer codes characterized by single and multi-qubit encoding operators. In particular, the error-correcting capabilities of such quantum codes are verified in graph-theoretic terms as originally advocated by Schlingemann and Werner. Finally, possible generalizations of our scheme for the graphical construction of both (stabilizer and nonadditive) nonbinary and continuous-variable quantum codes are briefly addressed.Comment: 42 pages, 12 figure