A Quantum Model of Computation

Abstract

In Section 1.3, we introduced the circuit model of (classical) computation. We restricted attention to reversible circuits since they can simulate any non-reversible circuit with modest overhead. This model can be generalized to a model of quantum circuits. In the quantum circuit model, we have logical qubits carried along ‘wires’, and quantum gates that act on the qubits. A quantum gate acting on n qubits has the input qubits carried to it by n wires, and n other wires carry the output qubits away from the gate. A quantum circuit is often illustrated schematically by a circuit diagram as shown in Figure 4.1. The wires are shown as horizontal lines, and we imagine the qubits propagating along the wires from left to right in time. The gates are shown as rectangular blocks. For convenience, we will restrict attention to unitary quantum gates (which are also reversible). Recall from Section 3.5.3 that non-unitary (non-reversible) quantum operations can be simulated by unitary (reversible) quantum gates if we allow the possibility of adding an ancilla and of discarding some output qubits. A circuit diagram describing a superoperator being implemented using a unitary operator is illustrated in Figure 4.2. In the example of Figure 4.1, the 4-qubit state |ψi⟩= |0⟩⊗ |0⟩⊗ |0⟩⊗ |0⟩ enters the circuit at the left (recall we often write this state as |ψi⟩ = |0⟩|0⟩|0⟩|0⟩ or |ψi⟩ = |0000⟩.) These qubits are processed by the gates U1, U2, U3, and U4. At the output of the circuit we have the collective (possibly entangled) 4-qubit state |ψf⟩. A measurement is then made of the resulting state. The measurement will often be a simple qubit-by-qubit measurement in the computational basis, but in some cases may be a more general measurement of the joint state. A measurement of a single qubit in the computational basis is denoted on a circuit diagram by a small triangle, as shown in Figure 4.1 (there are other symbols used in the literature, but we adopt this one). The triangle symbol will be modified for cases in which there is a need to indicate different types of measurements.R50