Quantum circuit distillation and compression

Abstract

Quantum coherence in a qubit is vulnerable to environmental noise. When long quantum calculation is run on a quantum processor without error correction, the noise causes fatal errors and messes up the calculation. Here, we propose quantum-circuit distillation to generate quantum circuits that are short but have enough functions to produce an output similar to that of the original circuits. The distilled circuits are less sensitive to the noise and can complete calculation before the quantum coherence is broken. We created a quantum-circuit distillator by building a reinforcement learning model, and applied it to the inverse quantum Fourier transform (IQFT) and Shor’s quantum prime factorization. The obtained distilled circuit allows correct calculation on IBM-Quantum processors. By working with the distillator, we also found a general rule to generate quantum circuits approximating the general n-qubit IQFTs. The quantum-circuit distillator offers a new approach to improve performance of noisy quantum processors.