ReQWIRE: Reasoning about Reversible Quantum Circuits

Robert Rand
Jennifer Paykin
Dong-Ho Lee
Steve Zdancewic

Common quantum algorithms make heavy use of ancillae: scratch qubits that are initialized at some state and later returned to that state and discarded. Existing quantum circuit languages let programmers assert that a qubit has been returned to the |0> state before it is discarded, allowing for a range of optimizations. However, existing languages do not provide the tools to verify these assertions, introducing a potential source of errors. In this paper we present methods for verifying that ancillae are discarded in the desired state, and use these methods to implement a verified compiler from classical functions to quantum oracles.

In Peter Selinger and Giulio Chiribella: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2018), Halifax, Canada, 3-7th June 2018, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 287, pp. 299–312.
Published: 31st January 2019.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.287.17 bibtex PDF

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