On the CNOT-cost of TOFFOLI gates

  • Authors:
  • Vivek V. Shende;Igor L. Markov

  • Affiliations:
  • Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Department of EECS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

  • Venue:
  • Quantum Information & Computation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The three-input TOFFOLI gate is the workhorse of circuit synthesis for classical logic oper-ations on quantum data, e.g., reversible arithmetic circuits. In physical implementations,however, TOFFOLI gates are decomposed into six CNOT gates and several one-qubit gates.Though this decomposition has been known for at least 10 years, we provide here thefirst demonstration of its CNOT-optimality. We study three-qubit circuits which containless than six CNOT gates and implement a block-diagonal operator, then show that theyimplicitly describe the cosine-sine decomposition of a related operator. Leveraging thecanonical nature of such decompositions to limit one-qubit gates appearing in respectivecircuits, we prove that the n-qubit analogue of the TOFFOLI requires at least 2n CNOTgates. Additionally, our results offer a complete classification of three-qubit diagonaloperators by their CNOT-cost, which holds even if ancilla qubits are available.