No abstract

Quantum algorithms to solve practical problems in quantum chemistry, materials science, and matrix inversion often involve a significant amount of arithmetic operations which act on a superposition of inputs. These have to be compiled to a set of fault-tolerant low-level operations and throughout this translation process, the compiler aims to come close to the Pareto-optimal front between the number of required qubits and the depth of the resulting circuit. In this paper, we provide quantum circuits for floating-point addition and multiplication which we find using two vastly different approaches. The first approach is to automatically generate circuits from classical Verilog implementations using synthesis tools and the second is to generate and optimize these circuits by hand. We compare our two approaches and provide evidence that floating-point arithmetic is a viable candidate for use in quantum computing, at least for typical scientific applications, where addition operations usually do not dominate the computation. All our circuits were constructed and tested using the software tools LIQU i| and RevKit.

Recent developments in quantum hardware indicate that systems featuring more than 50 physical qubits are within reach. At this scale, classical simulation will no longer be feasible and there is a possibility that such quantum devices may outperform even classical supercomputers at certain tasks. With the rapid growth of qubit numbers and coherence times comes the increasingly difficult challenge of quantum program compilation. This entails the translation of a high-level description of a quantum algorithm to hardware-specific low-level operations which can be carried out by the quantum device. Some parts of the calculation may still be performed manually due to the lack of efficient methods. This, in turn, may lead to a design gap, which will prevent the programming of a quantum computer. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in fully-automatic quantum compilation. We motivate directions for future research to tackle these challenges. Yet, with the algorithms and approaches that exist today, we demonstrate how to automatically perform the quantum programming flow from algorithm to a physical quantum computer for a simple algorithmic benchmark, namely the hidden shift problem. We present and use two tool flows which invoke RevKit. One which is based on ProjectQ and which targets the IBM Quantum Experience or a local simulator, and one which is based on Microsoft's quantum programming language Q#.