%0 Journal Article %J Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages %D 2021 %T A Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits %A Kesha Hietala %A Robert Rand %A Shih-Han Hung %A Xiaodi Wu %A Michael Hicks %X

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.

%B Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages %V 5 %8 11/12/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02250 %N POPL %R https://doi.org/10.1145/3434318