Past exam of the computer science course of the University of Oxford / 2022 / Quantum information / 2 / b / ii / Solution

The gate set is not universal. The displayed two-qubit matrix is the SWAP gate:Both $V$ and the Hadamard gate act on one qubit. Thus every gate preserves a fully factored product state, and induction gives the same property for every quantum circuit built from them. This is the product-state obstruction to SWAP universality.

For a quantitative obstruction to even approximate universality, every two-qubit product state has squared overlap at most $1/2$ with a Bell state. Indeed, for normalized coefficient vectors $u,v$,by the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. A controlled-NOT gate acting on $|+⟩|0⟩$ would instead produce that Bell state, so these circuits cannot approximate all unitary transformations. The fact that $V^2=e^{-i\pi /8}T$ supplies a T gate up to global phase does not supply an entangling gate.