April 15, 2018

# Failed Attempt To Reverse Swap Test

This post has born from an attempt of finding a reversible circuit for computing the swap test: a circuit used to compute the inner product of two quantum states. This circuit was originally proposed for solving the state distinguishably problem, but as you can imagine is very used in quantum machine learning too. Before starting, let’s note one thing. A reversible circuit for the swap test implies that we are able to recreate the two input states. Conceptually, this should be impossible, because of the no cloning theorem. With a very neat observation we can realize that we are not even able to preserve one of the states.

There is no unitary operator $U\ket{x}\ket{y}$ that allows you to estimate the scalar product between two states $x,y$ as $\braket{x|y}$ using only one copy of $\ket{x}$.

By absurd. Assume this unitary exists. Than it would be possible to estimate the scalar product between $\ket{x}$ and all the base states $\ket{i}$. (basically doing tomography for the state). This is a way of recover classically the state of $\ket{x}$. By knowing $\ket{x}$, we could recreate as many copies as we want of $\ket{x}$. Therefore, we could use this procedure to clone a state. This is prevented by the no-cloning theorem.

Let’s see what happens if we try to reverse it.

It is good to know that the circuit in Figure [conservative] is inspired by the proof $BPP \subseteq BQP$. The idea is the following: if after a swap test, and before doing any measurement on the ancilla qubit, we do a CNOT on a second ancillary qubit, and then execute the inverse of the swap test. Being the swap test self-inverse operator, it simply means that we apply the swap test twice. Let’s start the calculations from the CNOT on the second ancilla qubit.

$p(\ket{0}) = \frac{1}{4}\Big( 2 + 2 |\braket{ab|ba}|\Big) = \frac{ 1+ \braket{ab|ba}}{2} = \frac{ 1+ |\braket{a|b}|^2}{2}$ And therefore $p(\ket{1})$ is $\frac{ 1- |\braket{a|b}|^2}{2}$ as in the original swap test. So, the result is the same, but as in the original swap test, the register are pretty entangled, therefore we haven’t reversed our swap.

Here I have applied the rules:

• $(A\otimes B)^{\dagger} = A^{\dagger} \otimes B^{\dagger}$

• $\left( \bra{\phi} \otimes \bra{\psi} \right) \left( \ket{\phi} \otimes \ket{\psi} \right) = \braket{\psi, \psi} \otimes \braket{\phi, \phi}$

You may have noted that this circuit is very similar to circuit that you obtain if you perform amplitude amplification Brassard et al. (2000) on the swap test. The swap circuit is the algorithm $A$ that produces states with a certain probability distribution, and the CNOT is the unitary $U_f$ that is able to recognize the “good” states from bad states. By setting the second ancilla qubit to $\ket{+}$ we would be able to write on the phase of our state some useful information to recover with a QFT later on. That’s very cool, since amplitude amplification allows us to decrease quadratically the computational complexity of the algorithm with respect to the error in the estimation of the amplitude of the ancilla qubit.

Brassard, Gilles, Peter Høyer, Michele Mosca, and Alain Tapp. 2000. “Quantum Amplitude Amplification and Estimation.” *ArXiv Preprint Quant-Ph/0005055*.