A Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits

12/04/2019

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by   Kesha Hietala, et al.

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We present VOQC, the first fully verified compiler for quantum circuits, written using the Coq proof assistant. Quantum circuits are expressed as programs in a simple, low-level language called SQIR, which is deeply embedded in Coq. Optimizations and other transformations are expressed as Coq functions, which are proved correct with respect to a semantics of SQIR programs. We evaluate VOQC's verified optimizations on a series of benchmarks, and it performs comparably to industrial-strength compilers. VOQC's optimizations reduce total gate counts on average by 17.7 programs compared to a 10.7