Gate-level simulation of quantum circuits

Abstract

Simulating quantum computation on a classical computer is a difficult problem. The matrices representing quantum gates, and vectors modeling qubit states grow exponentially with an increase in the number of qubits. However, by using a new data structure called the Quantum Information Decision Diagram (QuIDD) that exploits the structure of quantum operators, many of these matrices and vectors can be represented in a form that grows polynomially. Using QuIDDs, we implemented a general-purpose quantum computing simulator in C++ called QuIDDPro and tested it on Grover's algorithm. Our QuIDD technique asymptotically outperforms other known simulation techniques.