Generalized Efficient Quantum Circuit Implementation of Discrete-Time Quantum Walks on Cayley Graphs

Abstract

We present a generalized and efficient quantum circuit framework for implementing discrete-time quantum walks (DTQWs) on Cayley graphs of arbitrary dimension. Building on the Boundary QFT scheme of Razzoli et al., we introduce a systematic multi-stage decomposition of the shift operator for 1D Cayley graphs across three classes of generating sets: inverse-closed without involutions, inverse-closed with an involution, and non-inverse-closed. The decomposition hierarchically factorizes the QFT-diagonalized shift operator into structured block components, progressively reducing the control degree of the required rotation gates and replacing high-degree multi-qubit controlled operations with collections of lower-degree equivalents. We extend this construction to $d$-dimensional torus graphs and provide explicit circuit implementations for an 8-Cayley graph and a $\mathbb{Z}_{16} \times \mathbb{Z}_8$ torus graph as concrete illustrations. Gate complexity analysis using the linear CNOT scaling of Rosa et al. demonstrates that the decomposed implementation achieves a substantial reduction in upper-bound CNOT cost relative to the naive implementation within the regime $k \leq 64$ for inverse-closed graphs and $k \leq 16$ for non-inverse-closed graphs, where $k$ denotes the degree of the generating set. Benchmarking further reveals that this efficiency gain is largely insensitive to the system size $N$, identifying $k$ as the dominant resource parameter for the shift operator. These results provide a scalable and hardware-conscious pathway toward practical DTQW implementations on near-term quantum devices.