Verification of Recursively Defined Quantum Circuits

Abstract

Recursive techniques have recently been introduced into quantum programming so that a variety of large quantum circuits and algorithms can be elegantly and compactly programmed. In this paper, we present a proof system for formal verification of the correctness of recursively defined quantum circuits. The soundness and (relative) completeness of the proof system are established. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we present a series of application examples, including formal verification of multi-qubit controlled gates, a quantum circuit for generating multi-qubit GHZ (Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger) states, and more sophisticated quantum algorithms with recursive structures such as the quantum Fourier transform, quantum state preparation, and quantum random access memories (QRAMs).