Classification of transversal gates in qubit stabilizer codes

Abstract

This work classifies the set of diagonal gates that can implement a single or two-qubit transversal logical gate for qubit stabilizer codes. We show that individual physical gates on the underlying qubits that compose the code are restricted to have entries of the form $e^{i \pi c/2^k}$ along their diagonal, resulting in a similarly restricted class of logical gates that can be implemented in this manner. Moreover, we show that all diagonal logical gates that can be implemented transversally by individual physical diagonal gates must belong to the Clifford hierarchy. Furthermore, we can use this result to prove a conjecture about transversal gates made by Zeng et al. in 2007.