Linear-depth quantum circuits for multiqubit controlled gates

Quantum circuit depth minimization is critical for practical applications of circuit-based quantum computation. In this work, we present a systematic procedure to decompose multiqubit controlled unitary gates, which is essential in many quantum algorithms, to controlled-not and single-qubit gates with which the quantum circuit depth only increases linearly with the number of control qubits. Our algorithm does not require any ancillary qubits and achieves a quadratic reduction of the circuit depth against known methods. We show the advantage of our algorithm with proof-of-principle demonstrations on the IBM quantum cloud platform.