The SWITCH test for discriminating quantum evolutions

Abstract

We propose a quantum circuit to discriminate between two arbitrary quantum evolution operators. It permits to test the equality of two quantum operators and to estimate a fidelity measure of them. The relation of the proposal to the SWAP test for discriminating two quantum states is analyzed. We also discuss potential applications for the discrimination of quantum communication channels and possible laboratory implementations with light along the same lines of recent experimental realizations of quantum superpositions of causal orders exploiting the different degrees of freedom of photons. We also discuss hardware efficient realizations for noisy intermediate scale quantum computers.