On the CNOT -cost of TOFFOLI gates

Abstract

The three-input \TOFFOLI\ gate is the workhorse of circuit synthesis for classical logic operations 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 the first demonstration of its \CNOT-optimality. We study three-qubit circuits which contain less than six \CNOT\ gates and implement a block-diagonal operator, then show that they implicitly describe the cosine-sine decomposition of a related operator. Leveraging the canonical nature of such decompositions to limit one-qubit gates appearing in respective circuits, we prove that the $n$-qubit analogue of the \TOFFOLI\ requires at least $2n$ \CNOT\ gates. Additionally, our results offer a complete classification of three-qubit diagonal operators by their \CNOT -cost, which holds even if ancilla qubits are available.