IEEE Transactions on Quantum Software uantumEngineering Received March 24, 2020; revised July 29, 2020; accepted August 31, 2020; date of publication September 11, 2020; date of current version October 5, 2020. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TQE.2020.3023419 Logical Clifford Synthesis for Stabilizer Codes NARAYANAN RENGASWAMY1 (Student Member, IEEE), ROBERT CALDERBANK1 (Fellow, IEEE), SWANAND KADHE2 (Member, IEEE), AND HENRY D. PFISTER1 (Senior Member, IEEE) 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 USA 2 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA Corresponding author: Narayanan Rengaswamy (e-mail:
[email protected]). Part of this work was presented at the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory [1]. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1718494, 1908730, and 1910571. ABSTRACT Quantum error-correcting codes are used to protect qubits involved in quantum computation. This process requires logical operators to be translated into physical operators acting on physical quantum states. In this article, we propose a mathematical framework for synthesizing physical circuits that implement logical Clifford operators for stabilizer codes. Circuit synthesis is enabled by representing the desired physical Clifford operator in CN×N as a 2m × 2m binary symplectic matrix, where N = 2m. We prove two theorems that use symplectic transvections to effciently enumerate all binary symplectic matrices that satisfy a system of linear equations. As a corollary, we prove that for an [[m, k]]stabilizer code every logical Clifford operator has 2r(r+1)/2 symplectic solutions, where r = m − k, up to stabilizer degeneracy.