Multi-controlled Phase Gate Synthesis with ZX-calculus applied to Neutral Atom Hardware

Quantum circuit synthesis describes the process of converting arbitrary unitary operations into a gate sequence of a fixed universal gate set, usually defined by the operations native to a given hardware platform. Most current synthesis algorithms are designed to synthesize towards a set of single-qubit rotations and an additional entangling two-qubit gate, such as CX, CZ, or the Mølmer–Sørensen gate. However, with the emergence of neutral atom-based hardware and their native support for gates with more than two qubits, synthesis approaches tailored to these new gate sets become necessary. In this work, we present an approach to synthesize (multi-) controlled phase gates using ZX-calculus. By representing quantum circuits as graph-like ZX-diagrams, one can utilize the distinct graph structure of diagonal gates to identify multi-controlled phase gates inherently present in some quantum circuits even if none were explicitly defined in the original circuit. We evaluate the approach on a wide range of benchmark circuits and compare them to the standard Qiskit synthesis regarding its circuit execution time for neutral atom-based hardware with native support of multi-controlled gates. Our results show possible advantages for current state-of-the-art hardware and represent the first exact synthesis algorithm supporting arbitrary-sized multi-controlled phase gates.