Efficient design of a quantum absolute-value circuit using Clifford+T gates

Abstract

Current quantum computers have a limited number of resources and are heavily affected by internal and external noise. Therefore, small, noise-tolerant circuits are of great interest. With regard to circuit size, it is especially important to reduce the number of required qubits. Concerning to fault-tolerance, circuits entirely built with Clifford+T gates allow the use of error correction codes. However, the T-gate has an excessive cost, so circuits with a high number of T-gates should be avoided. This work focuses on optimising in such terms an operation that is widely used in larger circuits and algorithms: the calculation of the absolute-value of two's complement encoded integers. The proposed circuit reduces by more than half the number of required T gates with respect to the best circuit currently available in the literature. Moreover, our proposal is the circuit that requires the fewest qubits for such an operation.