Quantum circuit syntheses of Boolean matrix multiplication using only CNOT gates

Abstract Boolean matrices and operations on Boolean matrices have become increasingly popular in quantum computing and quantum information because they can be used to represent quantum states and the corresponding operations. In this paper, we first give a quantum circuit direct synthesis of general Boolean matrix multiplication using Toffoli gates. We assign a qubit to each element of the matrix and add Toffoli gates at the corresponding positions where the matrix elements are multiplied according to the arithmetic of matrix multiplication. For n × p dimensional matrix A multiplied by p × m dimensional matrix B , np + pm + nm qubits and at most pmn Toffoli gates are used in total. Then, an improved heuristic algorithm based on matrix Hamming distance selection of CNOT gate is proposed to synthesize the quantum circuit of a matrix, without using wire switching and SWAP gates, using only CNOT gates. The results show that our method is as good as or better than the classical synthesis. Finally, the quantum circuit of Boolean matrix multiplication with at least one invertible or full-rank matrix using only CNOT gates is given, which is divided into five cases for discussion and analysis. For n × n dimensional invertible matrix A multiplied by n × m dimensional matrix B , nm qubits and at most mn 2 CNOT gates are used in total. For n × p dimensional column full-rank matrix A multiplied by p × m dimensional matrix B , nm qubits and at most pmn CNOT gates are used in total. The results show that this method uses less quantum resources to synthesize the quantum circuit of Boolean matrix multiplication. The correctness of the quantum circuits was verified by the Aer simulator of the IBM Quantum platform.