2013/09/16 by Anirban Pathak, Pathak, Anirban
Computer Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1309.4037
openalex publication_date 2013/09/16 · openalex created_date 2017/04/07 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is well known that most of the frequently used reversible logic gates (e.g., NOT, CNOT, SWAP, Toffoli, Fredkin) are self-inverse and are represented by square matrices that are unitary and Hermitian. However, with a simple minded argument, it is established that the most of the allowed reversible gates are non-self-inverse (unitary but non-Hermitian) in nature. It is also shown that the % of non-Hermitian gates increases with the dimension. For example, 58.33% of the 2-bit gates, 98.10% of the 3-bit gates and 99.99% of the 4-bit gates are non-Hermitian. As classical reversible gates are essentially permutation gates, above statistics is strictly valid for classical reversible gates, but the argument can be easily extended to include quantum gates and to establish that the majority of the quantum gates are also non-self-inverse. Further, the % of genuinely 2-bit reversible gates (i.e., 2-bit gates that cannot be decomposed as a product of two single bit gates) among all possible gates has been computed as 83.3%, and the applicability of this analysis in the optimization of circuit cost is discussed.