TY - JOUR T1 - A Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Y1 - 2021 A1 - Kesha Hietala A1 - Robert Rand A1 - Shih-Han Hung A1 - Xiaodi Wu A1 - Michael Hicks AB -

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% on a benchmark of 29 circuit programs compared to a 10.7% reduction when using IBM's Qiskit compiler.

VL - 5 UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02250 CP - POPL U5 - https://doi.org/10.1145/3434318 ER -