An ASP Approach for the Synthesis of CNOT Minimal Quantum Circuits

In the last year, physical working Quantum Computers have been built and made available for the end users. Such devices, working under the rules of Quantum Mechanics, can only apply a finite set of one/two qubit operations that form a universal set of gates. Single qubit gates are fault-tolerant, while the same cannot be said for two qubit gates. Hence, unitary matrices adopted in Quantum Algorithms must be synthesized in terms of this universal set of operations to obtain a quantum circuit. This synthesis procedure, however, is not constraint-free. In fact, we prefer circuits with minimum number of qubits and with minimum circuit depth. Clifford+T universal set is one of the most adopted in the literature for synthesis. In such set we have 3 single qubit gates and the CNOT, which is a two qubit gate. Many efforts have been directed to devise algorithms that synthesize general unitary matrices into Clifford+T circuits. These algorithms usually tend to optimize circuit depth or eventually the number of T gates. Since two qubit gates are not fault tolerant, in this work we propose an ASP based technique to minimize the number of CNOT gates inside a Clifford+T circuit. We start from a SAT encoding of the problem, and we translate it into an ASP model over a graph, by first working with a generic graph, and then by adopting the structure of a layered DAG. We provide experimental evidence of the scalability of our proposal.