dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaSparse quantum state preparation with improved Toffoli cost
| Authors | Felix Rupprecht, Sabine Wölk |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.09388vv1 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09388 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Abstract
The preparation of quantum states is one of the most fundamental tasks in quantum computing, and a key primitive in many quantum algorithms. Of particular interest to areas such as quantum simulation and linear-system solvers are sparse quantum states, which contain only a small number $s$ of non-zero computational basis states compared to a generic state. In this work, we present an approach that prepares $s$-sparse states on $n$ qubits, reducing the number of Toffoli gates required compared to prior art. We work in the established framework of first preparing a dense state on a $\lceil{\log(s)}\rceil$-qubit sub-register, and then mapping this state to the target state via an isometry, with the latter step dominating the cost of the full algorithm. The speed-up is achieved by designing an efficient algorithm for finding and implementing the isometry. The worst-case Toffoli cost of our isometry circuit, which may be viewed as a batched version of an approach by Malvetti et al., is essentially $2s$ for sufficiently large values of $n$, yielding roughly a $\log(s)/2$ improvement factor over the state-of-the-art. In numerical benchmarks on randomly chosen states, the cost is closer to $s$. With the improved isometry circuit, we examine the dense-state preparation step and present ways to optimize the joint cost of both steps, particularly in the case of target states with purely real coefficients, by outsourcing some sub-tasks from the dense-state preparation to the isometry.
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"abstract": "The preparation of quantum states is one of the most fundamental tasks in quantum computing, and a key primitive in many quantum algorithms. Of particular interest to areas such as quantum simulation and linear-system solvers are sparse quantum states, which contain only a small number $s$ of non-zero computational basis states compared to a generic state. In this work, we present an approach that prepares $s$-sparse states on $n$ qubits, reducing the number of Toffoli gates required compared to prior art. We work in the established framework of first preparing a dense state on a $\\lceil{\\log(s)}\\rceil$-qubit sub-register, and then mapping this state to the target state via an isometry, with the latter step dominating the cost of the full algorithm. The speed-up is achieved by designing an efficient algorithm for finding and implementing the isometry. The worst-case Toffoli cost of our isometry circuit, which may be viewed as a batched version of an approach by Malvetti et al., is essentially $2s$ for sufficiently large values of $n$, yielding roughly a $\\log(s)/2$ improvement factor over the state-of-the-art. In numerical benchmarks on randomly chosen states, the cost is closer to $s$. With the improved isometry circuit, we examine the dense-state preparation step and present ways to optimize the joint cost of both steps, particularly in the case of target states with purely real coefficients, by outsourcing some sub-tasks from the dense-state preparation to the isometry.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.09388",
"authors": [
"Felix Rupprecht",
"Sabine W\u00f6lk"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph"
],
"license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"title": "Sparse quantum state preparation with improved Toffoli cost",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09388",
"version": "v1"
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