Universal quantum computation with unlabeled qubits

Abstract

We show that an n-th root of the Walsh-Hadamard transform (obtained from the Hadamard gate and a cyclic permutation of the qubits), together with two diagonal matrices, namely a local qubit-flip (for a fixed but arbitrary qubit) and a non-local phase-flip (for a fixed but arbitrary coefficient), can do universal quantum computation on n qubits. A quantum computation, making use of n qubits and based on these operations, is then a word of variable length, but whose letters are always taken from an alphabet of cardinality three. Therefore, in contrast with other universal sets, no choice of qubit lines is needed for the application of the operations described here. A quantum algorithm based on this set can be interpreted as a discrete diffusion of a quantum particle on a de Bruijn graph, corrected on-the-fly by auxiliary modifications of the phases associated to the arcs.