General structures of reversible and quantum gates

Abstract

The most general structure (in matrix form) of a single-qubit gate is presented. Subsequently, used that to obtain a set of conditions for testing (a) whether a given 2-qubit gate is genuinely a 2-qubit gate, i.e., not decomposable into two single qubit gates and (b) whether a given single qubit gate is self-inverse? Relevance of the results reported here is discussed in the context of optimization of reversible and quantum circuits, especially for the optimization of quantum cost. A systematic procedure is developed for the identification of the non-decomposable 2-qubit gates. Such a non-decomposable 2-qubit gate along with all possible single qubit gates form a universal quantum gate library. Further, some possible applications of the present work are also discussed.