https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01750-y
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Controlled gate networks: theory and application to eigenvalue estimation
1
School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 30332, Atlanta, GA, USA
2
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, 48824, East Lansing, MI, USA
3
Quantinuum, 303 S. Technology Ct., 80021, Broomfield, CO, USA
Received:
27
March
2025
Accepted:
12
November
2025
Published online:
21
November
2025
We introduce a new scheme for quantum circuit design called controlled gate networks. Rather than trying to reduce the complexity of individual unitary operations, the new strategy is to toggle between all of the unitary operations needed with the fewest number of gates. We present the general theory of controlled gate networks and show that, under quite general conditions, it can significantly reduce the number of two-qubit gates needed to produce linear combinations of unitary operators. The first example we consider is a variational subspace calculation for a two-qubit system. The second example is estimating the eigenvalues of a two-qubit Hamiltonian via the rodeo algorithm (Choi et al. in Phys Rev Lett 127(4):040505, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.040505) using operators that we call controlled reversal gates. We use the Quantinuum H1-2 and IBM Perth devices to realize the quantum circuits. The third example is the application of controlled gate networks to the controlled time evolution of a free nucleon on a three-dimensional lattice. For all of the examples, we show very substantial reductions in the number of two-qubit gates required. Our work demonstrates that controlled gate networks are a useful tool for reducing gate complexity in quantum algorithms for quantum many-body problems such as those relevant to nuclear physics.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-025-01750-y.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
