Universal quantum circuit for n-qubit quantum gate: a programmable quantum gate

Quantum computation has attracted much attention, among other things, due to its potentialities to solve classical NP problems in polynomial time. For this reason, there has been a growing interest to build a quantum computer. One of the basic steps is to implement the quantum circuit able to realize a given unitary operation. This task has been solved using decomposition of unitary matrices in simpler ones till reach quantum circuits having only single-qubits and CNOTs gates. Usually the goal is to find the minimal quantum circuit able to solve a given problem. In this paper we go in a different direction. We propose a general quantum circuit able to implement any specific quantum circuit by just setting correctly the parameters. In other words, we propose a programmable quantum circuit. This opens the possibility to construct a real quantum computer where several different quantum operations can be realized in the same hardware. The configuration is proposed and its optical implementation is discussed.