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Paper 1

A Framework for Approximating Qubit Unitaries

Vadym Kliuchnikov, Alex Bocharov, Martin Roetteler, Jon Yard

Year
2015
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:1510.03888
arXiv
1510.03888

We present an algorithm for efficiently approximating of qubit unitaries over gate sets derived from totally definite quaternion algebras. It achieves $\varepsilon$-approximations using circuits of length $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$, which is asymptotically optimal. The algorithm achieves the same quality of approximation as previously-known algorithms for Clifford+T [arXiv:1212.6253], V-basis [arXiv:1303.1411] and Clifford+$π/12$ [arXiv:1409.3552], running on average in time polynomial in $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ (conditional on a number-theoretic conjecture). Ours is the first such algorithm that works for a wide range of gate sets and provides insight into what should constitute a "good" gate set for a fault-tolerant quantum computer.

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Paper 2

Tradeoffs on the volume of fault-tolerant circuits

Anirudh Krishna, Gilles Zémor

Year
2025
Journal
arXiv preprint
DOI
arXiv:2510.03057
arXiv
2510.03057

Dating back to the seminal work of von Neumann [von Neumann, Automata Studies, 1956], it is known that error correcting codes can overcome faulty circuit components to enable robust computation. Choosing an appropriate code is non-trivial as it must balance several requirements. Increasing the rate of the code reduces the relative number of redundant bits used in the fault-tolerant circuit, while increasing the distance of the code ensures robustness against faults. If the rate and distance were the only concerns, we could use asymptotically optimal codes as is done in communication settings. However, choosing a code for computation is challenging due to an additional requirement: The code needs to facilitate accessibility of encoded information to enable computation on encoded data. This seems to conflict with having large rate and distance. We prove that this is indeed the case, namely that a code family cannot simultaneously have constant rate, growing distance and short-depth gadgets to perform encoded CNOT gates. As a consequence, achieving good rate and distance may necessarily entail accepting very deep circuits, an undesirable trade-off in certain architectures and applications.

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