Interaction-resolved decomposition of multi-qubit unitaries via computational-basis phases

Abstract

In multi-qubit quantum control, target unitary operations are commonly specified through full-unitary target descriptions and assessed through global comparison measures. In this work, we introduce an interaction-resolved decomposition of n-qubit unitaries that provides explicit access to their many-body interaction structure through computational-basis phases collected in a diagonalizing frame. Such a frame is conveniently given by local rotations for many operationally relevant operations, including gates generated by single Pauli strings or commuting sets of Pauli strings, such as stabilizer operations, controlled-phase gates, Toffoli-type operations, and Ising interactions. We derive parity-weighted sums of these computational-basis phases that exactly and uniquely resolve k-body interaction terms supported on arbitrary qubit subsets, which we term support-selective phase invariants. These invariants provide an interaction-resolved coordinate system that organizes unitary operations according to their multipartite interaction structure, giving direct access to local, pairwise, tripartite, and general k-partite interaction content underlying entangling operations. This enables the formulation of selective quantum optimal control targets for synthesizing desired combinations of many-body interactions. We supplement this with numerical demonstrations for a representative hardware model, a realistic nitrogen-vacancy spin register, where we synthesized isolated tripartite interactions up to local equivalence within a single control pulse, guided by these invariants, for both diagonal (ZZZ) and non-diagonal (XZZ) terms.