Martin Roetteler

We present two methods for the construction of quantum circuits for quantum error-correcting codes (QECC). The underlying quantum systems are tensor products of subsystems (qudits) of equal dimension which is a prime power. For a QECC encoding k qudits into n qudits, the resulting quantum circuit has O(n(n-k)) gates. The running time of the classical algorithm to compute the quantum circuit is O(n(n-k)^2).

Suppose that a quantum circuit with K elementary gates is known for a unitary matrix U, and assume that U^m is a scalar matrix for some positive integer m. We show that a function of U can be realized on a quantum computer with at most O(mK+m^2log m) elementary gates. The functions of U are realized by a generic quantum circuit, which has a particularly simple structure. Among other results, we obtain efficient circuits for the fractional Fourier transform.

We show that many well-known signal transforms allow highly efficient realizations on a quantum computer. We explain some elementary quantum circuits and review the construction of the Quantum Fourier Transform. We derive quantum circuits for the Discrete Cosine and Sine Transforms, and for the Discrete Hartley transform. We show that at most O(log^2 N) elementary quantum gates are necessary to implement any of those transforms for input sequences of length N.

Nice error bases have been introduced by Knill as a generalization of the Pauli basis. These bases are shown to be projective representations of finite groups. We classify all nice error bases of small degree, and all nice error bases with abelian index groups. We show that in general an index group of a nice error basis is necessarily solvable.

Any quantum system with a non-trivial Hamiltonian is able to simulate any other Hamiltonian evolution provided that a sufficiently large group of unitary control operations is available. We show that there exist finite groups with this property and present a sufficient condition in terms of group characters. We give examples of such groups in dimension 2 and 3. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to simulate an arbitrary bipartite interaction by a given one using such groups acting locally on the subsystems.

We present a family of non-abelian groups for which the hidden subgroup problem can be solved efficiently on a quantum computer.

We investigate means to describe the nonlocal properties of quantum systems and to test if two quantum systems are locally equivalent. For this we consider quantum systems that consist of several subsystems, especially multiple quantum bits, i.e., systems consisting of subsystems of dimension 2. We compute invariant polynomials, i.e., polynomial functions of the entries of the density operator that are invariant under local unitary operations. As an example, we consider a system of two quantum bits. We compute the Molien series for the corresponding representation, which gives information about the number of linearly independent invariants. Furthermore, we present a set of polynomials that generate all invariants (at least) up to degree 23. Finally, the use of invariants to check whether two density operators are locally equivalent is demonstrated.

An algorithm is presented allowing the construction of fast Fourier transforms for any solvable group on a classical computer. The special structure of the recursion formula being the core of this algorithm makes it a good starting point to obtain systematically fast Fourier transforms for solvable groups on a quantum computer. The inherent structure of the Hilbert space imposed by the qubit architecture suggests to consider groups of order 2^n first (where n is the number of qubits). As an example, fast quantum Fourier transforms for all 4 classes of non-abelian 2-groups with cyclic normal subgroup of index 2 are explicitly constructed in terms of quantum circuits. The (quantum) complexity of the Fourier transform for these groups of size 2^n is O(n^2) in all cases.