Real 3-qubit gate decompositions via triality

Abstract

We show that any unimodular real 3-qubit gate can be expressed as the product of at most 14 CNOT gates plus single-qubit gates, improving on the bound of 16 CNOTs due to Wei and Di. Our method uses the exotic triality symmetry of $\operatorname{PSO}(8)$, and we explore some of the useful properties of this map in relation to the study of real 3-qubit gates.