Product-state obstruction to SWAP universality

ID: product-state-obstruction-to-swap-universality

The SWAP gate and local unitary operators preserve product states. The displayed identity moves every exchange past a pair of local gates, reducing any such two-qubit quantum circuit to a local operation, optionally followed by SWAP gate. On more wires the same argument leaves a permutation of the tensor factors. By induction, a fully factored input remains factored. Since universal quantum computation includes operations that create quantum entanglement from a product state, these gates cannot form a universal quantum gate set.

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