Finding trail covers: near-optimal decompositions of graph states as linear fusion networks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cashman, William, de Felice, Giovanni, Kissinger, Aleks
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916917537669120
author Cashman, William
de Felice, Giovanni
Kissinger, Aleks
author_facet Cashman, William
de Felice, Giovanni
Kissinger, Aleks
contents Quantum compilation requires the development of new algorithms that optimise the cost of implementing quantum computations on physical hardware. Often this gives rise to problems which are asymptotically hard to solve classically, and for which heuristics and reductions to known problems are of great practical use. In this paper, we study three graph-theoretic problems which can be seen as generalisations of the Eulerian and Hamiltonian path problems. These arise in photonic implementations of measurement-based quantum computing, where graph states are constructed by fusing bounded-length linear resource states. Since the fusion operation succeeds with probability smaller than one, we wish to minimise the number of fusions required to build a particular graph state and this corresponds to finding a minimal path or trail cover of the graph. We show that these covering problems are NP-hard in most cases and give heuristic algorithms for finding trail covers in graphs including a reduction to the travelling salesman problem. We propose new rewrite strategies for graph states that reduce the number of fusions required to build a given graph. Finally, we apply these algorithms to the compilation of photonic fusion networks and provide a series of benchmarks showing the performance of our algorithms on common error-correcting codes and circuits from the QASMBench set.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_18375
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Finding trail covers: near-optimal decompositions of graph states as linear fusion networks
Cashman, William
de Felice, Giovanni
Kissinger, Aleks
Quantum Physics
Quantum compilation requires the development of new algorithms that optimise the cost of implementing quantum computations on physical hardware. Often this gives rise to problems which are asymptotically hard to solve classically, and for which heuristics and reductions to known problems are of great practical use. In this paper, we study three graph-theoretic problems which can be seen as generalisations of the Eulerian and Hamiltonian path problems. These arise in photonic implementations of measurement-based quantum computing, where graph states are constructed by fusing bounded-length linear resource states. Since the fusion operation succeeds with probability smaller than one, we wish to minimise the number of fusions required to build a particular graph state and this corresponds to finding a minimal path or trail cover of the graph. We show that these covering problems are NP-hard in most cases and give heuristic algorithms for finding trail covers in graphs including a reduction to the travelling salesman problem. We propose new rewrite strategies for graph states that reduce the number of fusions required to build a given graph. Finally, we apply these algorithms to the compilation of photonic fusion networks and provide a series of benchmarks showing the performance of our algorithms on common error-correcting codes and circuits from the QASMBench set.
title Finding trail covers: near-optimal decompositions of graph states as linear fusion networks
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18375