Quantum Compiling with Qudits

Oftentimes, researchers are afforded the convenience of thinking about quantum computing operations in whatever form is most relevant for their work. For theorists, this is usually as abstract unitary operations, and for experimentalists, this is generally as sequences of gates native to their particular experimental architecture. Quantum compilers serve as the translator between these two representations. Advances in quantum compiling have yielded algorithms that can not only perform this translation task for qubit circuits, but do so while providing maximally efficient circuits under some basic assumptions of circuit complexity. I will briefly touch on some of these results before discussing our recent work on extending efficient quantum compiling algorithms to the qudit (higher dimensional analogs of qubits) circuit case. In particular, this work demonstrates a maximally efficient quantum compiler for qutrit (dimension-3 qudits) Clifford + T circuits, and furthermore may point the way towards a generalized quantum compiling algorithm for all prime dimension qudits. Along the way, I will tie in the subjects of fault tolerance and quantum error correction, in particular focusing on how these topics may point to the fact that qudits warrant further consideration for real-world quantum computing architectures.
 
Notes: Snacks and drinks at 4:00 pm, talk at 4:10 pm.