Universal-NOT gate

Abstract

The action of a NOT gate on a classical bit results in a change of its value from a 0 to a 1 and vice versa. The action of the classical NOT gate is in principle perfect because with fidelity equal to unity it complements the value of a bit. The action of the quantum NOT gate in a computational basis |0⟩ and |1⟩ is very similar to the action of the classical NOT gate. However, a more general quantum mechanical operation which corresponds to a classical NOT gate would take a qubit in an arbitrary state |Ψ⟩ and produce a qubit in the state |Ψ⊥⟩ orthogonal to |Ψ⟩. This operation is anti-unitary and therefore, cannot be realized exactly. So how well we can do? We find a unitary transformation acting on an input qubit and some auxiliary qubits, which represent degrees of freedom of the quantum NOT gate itself, which approximately realizes the NOT operation on the state of the original qubit. We call this ‘device’ a universal-NOT gate because the size of the error it produces is independent of the input state. We show that an optimal U-NOT gate which has as its input N identical qubits and produces M outputs achieves a fidelity of F = (N + 1)/ (N + 2), which is equal to the fidelity of estimation of the input qubits. We also show that when a priori information about the state of the input qubit is available, the fidelity of a quantum NOT gate can be much better than the fidelity of estimation.