Optimization at the Interface of Unitary and Non-unitary Quantum Operations in PCOAST

The Pauli-based Circuit Optimization, Analysis and Synthesis Toolchain (PCOAST) was recently introduced as a framework for optimizing quantum circuits. It converts a quantum circuit to a Pauli-based graph representation and provides a set of optimization subroutines to manipulate that internal representation as well as methods for re-synthesizing back to a quantum circuit. In this paper, we focus on the set of subroutines which look to optimize the PCOAST graph in cases involving unitary and non-unitary operations as represented by nodes in the graph. This includes reduction of node cost and node number in the presence of preparation nodes, reduction of cost for Clifford operations in the presence of preparations, and measurement cost reduction using Clifford operations and the classical remapping of measurement outcomes. These routines can also be combined to amplify their effectiveness. We evaluate the PCOAST optimization subroutines using the Intel® Quantum SDK on examples of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) algorithm. This includes synthesizing a circuit for the simultaneous measurement of a mutually commuting set of Pauli operators. We find for such measurement circuits the overall average ratio of the maximum theoretical number of two-qubit gates to the actual number of two-qubit gates used by our method to be 7.91.