Extending the Frontier of Quantum Computers with Qutrits

Journal Article · Thu Apr 16 04:00:00 EDT 2020 · IEEE Micro

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/mm.2020.2985976· OSTI ID:1674937

Gokhale, Pranav ^[1]; Baker, Jonathan M. ^[2]; Duckering, Casey ^[2]; Brown, Natalie C. ^[3]; Brown, Kenneth R. ^[4]; Chong, Frederic T. ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States); University of Chicago
2. Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States)
3. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
4. Duke Univ., Durham, NC (United States)

Here, we advocate for a fundamentally different way to perform quantum computation by using three-level qutrits instead of qubits. In particular, we substantially reduce the resource requirements of quantum computations by exploiting a third state for temporary variables (ancilla) in quantum circuits. Past work with qutrits has demonstrated only constant factor improvements, owing to the log₂ (3) binary-to-ternary compression factor. We present a novel technique using qutrits to achieve a logarithmic runtime decomposition of the Generalized Toffoli gate using no ancilla - an exponential improvement over the best qubit-only equivalent. Our approach features a 70× improvement in total two-qudit gate count over the qubit-only decomposition. This results in improvements for important algorithms for arithmetic and QRAM. Simulation results under realistic noise models indicate over 90% mean reliability (fidelity) for our circuit, versus under 30% for the qubit-only baseline. These results suggest that qutrits offer a promising path toward extending the frontier of quantum computers.

• Research Organization: Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Engineering & Technology; National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0020289; SC0020331
• OSTI ID: 1674937
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1865687
• Journal Information: IEEE Micro, Journal Name: IEEE Micro Journal Issue: 3 Vol. 40; ISSN 0272-1732
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING