Shallow Quantum Scalar Products with Phase Information

Abstract

The measurement of scalar products between two vectors is a common task in scientific computing and, by extension, in quantum computing. In this work, we introduce two alternative quantum circuits for computing scalar products with phase information, combining the structure of the swap test, the vacuum test, and the Hadamard test. These novel frameworks, called the zero-control and one-control tests, present different trade-offs between circuit depth and qubit count for accessing the scalar product between two quantum states. We demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the gate count for large numbers of qubits and decreases the scaling of quantum requirements compared to the Hadamard test.