Checking whether two quantum circuits are equivalent is important for the
design and optimization of quantum-computer applications with real-world
devices. We consider quantum circuits consisting of Clifford gates, a
practically-relevant subset of all quantum operations which is large enough to
exhibit quantum features such as entanglement and forms the basis of, for
example, quantum-error correction and many quantum-network applications. We
present a deterministic algorithm that is based on a folklore mathematical
result and demonstrate that it is capable of outperforming previously
considered state-of-the-art method. In particular, given two Clifford circuits
as sequences of single- and two-qubit Clifford gates, the algorithm checks
their equivalence in O(nâ‹…m) time in the number of qubits n and number
of elementary Clifford gates m. Using the performant Stim simulator as
backend, our implementation checks equivalence of quantum circuits with 1000
qubits (and a circuit depth of 10.000 gates) in ∼22 seconds and circuits
with 100.000 qubits (depth 10) in ∼15 minutes, outperforming the existing
SAT-based and path-integral based approaches by orders of magnitude. This
approach shows that the correctness of application-relevant subsets of quantum
operations can be verified up to large circuits in practice