ReQWIRE: Reasoning about Reversible Quantum Circuits

Abstract

Common quantum algorithms make heavy use of ancillae: scratch qubits that are initialized at some state and later returned to that state and discarded. Existing quantum circuit languages let programmers assert that a qubit has been returned to the |0$>$ state before it is discarded, allowing for a range of optimizations. However, existing languages do not provide the tools to verify these assertions, introducing a potential source of errors. In this paper we present methods for verifying that ancillae are discarded in the desired state, and use these methods to implement a verified compiler from classical functions to quantum oracles.

Publication
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL), Halifax, Canada, June 3–7, 2018