Improved Quantum Ternary Arithmetics

Abstract: Qutrit (or ternary) structures arise naturally in many quantum systems, particularly in certain non-abelian anyon systems. We present efficient circuits for ternary reversible and quantum arithmetics. Our main result is the derivation of circuits for two families of ternary quantum adders, namely ripple carry adders and carry look-ahead adders. The main difference to the binary case is the more complicated form of the ternary carry, which leads to higher resource counts for implementations over a universal ternary gate set. Our ternary ripple adder circuit has a circuit depth of $O(n)$ and uses only $1$ ancilla, making it more efficient in both, circuit depth and width than previous constructions. Our ternary carry lookahead circuit has a circuit depth of only $O(\log\,n)$, while using with $O(n)$ ancillas. Our approach works on two levels of abstraction: at the first level, descriptions of arithmetic circuits are given in terms of gates sequences that use various types of non-Clifford reflections. At the second level, we break down these reflections further by deriving them either from the two-qutrit Clifford gates and the non-Clifford gate $C(X): |i,j\rangle \mapsto |i, j + \delta_{i,2} \mod 3\rangle$ or from the two-qutrit Clifford gates and the non-Clifford gate $P_9=\mbox{diag}(e^{-2 \pi \, i/9},1,e^{2 \pi \, i/9})$. The two choices of elementary gate sets correspond to two possible mappings onto two different prospective quantum computing architectures which we call the metaplectic and the supermetaplectic basis, respectively. Finally, we develop a method to factor diagonal unitaries using multi-variate polynomial over the ternary finite field which allows to characterize classes of gates that can be implemented exactly over the supermetaplectic basis.