Towards an Optimally Distributed Quantum Fourier Transform Circuit
Abstract
A promising avenue for scaling quantum computing is to connect quantum processing units (QPUs) by generating entanglement between them. This requires circuit partitioning: partially rewriting quantum circuits to run on a distributed quantum system using quantum teleportation protocols, while preserving the unitary operation implemented by the circuit. The key metric to minimize when partitioning is the e-bit count, defined as the number of maximally entangled qubit pairs that must be generated between QPUs. We focus on partitioning the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) circuit, which is widely used as a subroutine in quantum algorithms such as quantum phase estimation and arithmetic circuits. Specifically, we present an optimal gate-packing-based partitioning scheme under bounded communication ancilla constraints, as well as a novel detached-gate-based partitioning scheme that achieves optimal e-bit consumption when ancilla availability is unrestricted. We compare these schemes against prior analytical partitioning approaches for the QFT and evaluate them against partitions produced by general-purpose circuit partitioning algorithms. We further validate our approach by implementing the bounded-ancilla circuits on quantum hardware.
Related
- Communication-Efficient Distributed Inverse Quantum Fourier Transform
- Quantum Fourier transform for the symmetric group
- Contour-integral and Fourier transform based multivariable quantum eigenvalue transformation for commuting matrices
- 𝒪(n) alternative to Quantum Fourier Transform with efficient neural net classical post-processing
- Experimental demonstration of the Quantum Fourier Transform on up to 100 qubits using a convolutional compilation strategy
BibTeX
@misc{vernec2026towards,
title = {{Towards an Optimally Distributed Quantum Fourier Transform Circuit}},
author = {Zachary Vernec and Michael Silver and Hans-Arno Jacobsen},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.18494},
eprint = {2606.18494},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18494},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Towards an Optimally Distributed Quantum Fourier Transform Circuit
AU - Zachary Vernec
AU - Michael Silver
AU - Hans-Arno Jacobsen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.18494
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18494
AB - A promising avenue for scaling quantum computing is to connect quantum processing units (QPUs) by generating entanglement between them. This requires circuit partitioning: partially rewriting quantum circuits to run on a distributed quantum system using quantum teleportation protocols, while preserving the unitary operation implemented by the circuit. The key metric to minimize when partitioning is the e-bit count, defined as the number of maximally entangled qubit pairs that must be generated between QPUs. We focus on partitioning the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) circuit, which is widely used as a subroutine in quantum algorithms such as quantum phase estimation and arithmetic circuits. Specifically, we present an optimal gate-packing-based partitioning scheme under bounded communication ancilla constraints, as well as a novel detached-gate-based partitioning scheme that achieves optimal e-bit consumption when ancilla availability is unrestricted. We compare these schemes against prior analytical partitioning approaches for the QFT and evaluate them against partitions produced by general-purpose circuit partitioning algorithms. We further validate our approach by implementing the bounded-ancilla circuits on quantum hardware.
ER -