An Explicit Universal Gate-Set for Exchange-Only Quantum Computation

A single physical interaction might not be universal for quantum computation in general. It has been shown, however, that in some cases it can achieve universal quantum computation over a subspace. For example, by encoding logical qubits into arrays of multiple physical qubits, a single isotropic or anisotropic exchange interaction can generate a universal logical gate-set. Recently, encoded universality for the exchange interaction was explicitly demonstrated on three-qubit arrays, the smallest nontrivial encoding. We now present the exact specification of a discrete universal logical gate-set on four-qubit arrays. We show how to implement the single qubit operations exactly with at most 3 nearest neighbor exchange operations and how to generate the encoded controlled-NOT with 27 parallel nearest neighbor exchange interactions or 50 serial gates, obtained from extensive numerical optimization using genetic algorithms and Nelder–Mead searches. We also give gate-switching times for the three-qubit encoding to much higher accuracy than previously and provide the full speci.cation for exact CNOT for this encoding. Our gate-sequences are immediately applicable to implementations of quantum circuits with the exchange interaction.