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Concept
Quantum circuit
Summary
In quantum information theory, a quantum circuit is a model for quantum computation, similar to classical circuits, in which a computation is a sequence of quantum gates, measurements, initializations of qubits to known values, and possibly other actions. The minimum set of actions that a circuit needs to be able to perform on the qubits to enable quantum computation is known as DiVincenzo's criteria.
Circuits are written such that the horizontal axis is time, starting at the left hand side and ending at the right. Horizontal lines are qubits, doubled lines represent classical bits. The items that are connected by these lines are operations performed on the qubits, such as measurements or gates. These lines define the sequence of events, and are usually not physical cables.
The graphical depiction of quantum circuit elements is described using a variant of the Penrose graphical notation. Richard Feynman used an early version of the quantum circuit notation in 1986.
Most elementary logic gates of a classical computer are not reversible. Thus, for instance, for an AND gate one cannot always recover the two input bits from the output bit; for example, if the output bit is 0, we cannot tell from this whether the input bits are 01 or 10 or 00.
However, reversible gates in classical computers are easily constructed for bit strings of any length; moreover, these are actually of practical interest, since irreversible gates must always increase physical entropy. A reversible gate is a reversible function on n-bit data that returns n-bit data, where an n-bit data is a string of bits x1,x2, ...,xn of length n. The set of n-bit data is the space {0,1}n, which consists of 2n strings of 0's and 1's.
More precisely: an n-bit reversible gate is a bijective mapping f from the set {0,1}n of n-bit data onto itself.
An example of such a reversible gate f is a mapping that applies a fixed permutation to its inputs.
For reasons of practical engineering, one typically studies gates only for small values of n, e.g. n=1, n=2 or n=3.
Official source
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