Let be Alice's unknown qubit, and label her half of the shared Bell state by and Bob's by . Alice applies a Controlled-NOT gate from the unknown qubit to , then a Hadamard gate to the unknown qubit. The three-qubit state becomes
Alice measures her two qubits in the computational basis and sends the two classical outcomes to Bob. Bob applies , recovering with certainty. This is quantum teleportation; Alice never needs to know the state.
For the shared GHZ state, Charlie first applies a Hadamard gate to his qubit. Then
Charlie measures in the computational basis. Outcome leaves Alice and Bob with ; outcome leaves , which either party converts to by applying after Charlie reports the outcome. Thus
Quantum no-signalling says that, without communicating a measurement outcome, any local trace-preserving operation performed on subsystem leaves all outcome probabilities for measurements on subsystem unchanged; equivalently, it leaves the reduced density matrix unchanged.
The two Bell states are orthogonal. Applying the inverse Bell-state preparation circuit, namely a Controlled-NOT gate from to followed by a Hadamard gate on , gives
A computational-basis measurement therefore distinguishes them perfectly, so
If only is accessible, however,
Every measurement on consequently has the same outcome distribution under both hypotheses. With equal prior probabilities no information is available, and
the error probability of a random guess.
The printed sum contains although the stated labels end at . We use the natural periodic convention , with . If an open chain was intended, omitting the final term gives the same asymptotic bound.
Set , with indices modulo , and implement the product-formula Hamiltonian simulation
Each factor acts on two qubits, so it is a two-qubit unitary operator. More explicitly, if , , and is a controlled-NOT gate,
where is a Hadamard gate. This gives a constant number of one-qubit and two-qubit gates per factor; one-qubit gates can also be viewed as two-qubit gates tensored with the identity.
The spectral norm obeys the triangle inequality, submultiplicativity of the operator norm, and invariance under multiplication by unitary operators. In particular, the telescoping bound for products of operators gives for unitary . The first-order unitary product-formula error bound consequently yields
Only neighboring terms can have a nonzero commutator, because all other supports are disjoint. There are neighboring unordered pairs, and . Thus . Choosing gives
The coarser bound that counts all pairs also proves the often-used construction. Locality improves that cubic estimate to the quadratic bound above; neither assertion is a lower bound on the best possible circuit.
The controlled-NOT gate sends to and to . Hence
Since the Hadamard gate satisfies ,
The three controlled-NOT gates have directions , , and . On computational basis bits they act as
By linearity, the whole quantum circuit is the SWAP gate. Therefore
so and .
Prepare an ancilla qubit in . To measure , apply a Hadamard gate to each data qubit, apply a controlled-NOT gate from each data qubit to the ancilla, measure the ancilla in the computational basis, and apply a Hadamard gate to each data qubit again. The ancilla records the parity of the two rotated computational-basis bits, so outcome corresponds to eigenvalue and outcome to eigenvalue . The data register is projected by , so its complete post-measurement state is retained. For , perform the same ancilla-assisted Pauli measurement but apply the basis-changing Hadamard gates only to the second data qubit.
Use controlled-NOT gates in parallel. For each , the th input qubit is the control and the th output-register qubit is the target. Their combined action is
which is exactly
For the controlled-NOT gate , propagation of the Pauli generators gives
Thus an on the control propagates forward to the target, while a on the target propagates backward to the control.
Suppose has the same four conjugation rules and put . Then commutes with . These generators span the full two-qubit operator algebra, so its commutant consists only of scalar multiples of the identity. Hence and
Apply the gates from left to right. The first Hadamard gate and the first controlled-NOT gate produce the Bell state
The parallel gates then produce
The final controlled-NOT has the lower qubit as control; it interchanges and , whose amplitudes here are equal. Thus the output is
By quantum measurement in the computational basis, every basis outcome has probability equal to the squared modulus of its amplitude:
Use three controlled-NOT gates with control-target directions
On computational-basis bits they act as
They therefore implement the Three-CNOT decomposition of the SWAP gate, and linearity proves the identity on every two-qubit state.
Each summand of acts on one qubit, while each summand of acts on two. Therefore is a 2-local Hamiltonian. We have
Split into steps of length and use the second-order product formula
For one step, in the stated estimate, so the spectral-norm error is . The error bound for a product of unitary operators makes the total error
It is therefore enough to choose
with also large enough that the small-step estimate applies.
All terms commute. A factor uses a constant-size circuit of two controlled-NOT gates and one phase gate, up to a global phase, so one product-formula step costs gates. The complete Hamiltonian simulation consequently has size
Write and . Before measurement, the three controlled-NOT gates map a computational-basis component to
The measured bit is therefore . For , the unnormalized state of the first qubit is
For , it is
Each branch has probability ; after normalization and removal of the irrelevant global phase , the two outputs are
with equal probability. This is probabilistic phase-gate injection.
Apply a Hadamard gate to Alice's qubit, followed by a controlled-NOT gate from Alice to Bob and another from Alice to Charlie:
Thus this circuit gives the required quantum circuit preparation of a three-qubit GHZ state.
The magic state and a short controlled-NOT gate circuit can apply either or to an input, with a measured bit identifying the branch.