# A 12-CNOT Double Qubit Excitation Gate

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11733/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Optimal Layout Synthesis for Quantum Circuits as Classical Planning (full version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12014/) (2023)
- [Optimal Layout-Aware CNOT Circuit Synthesis with Qubit Permutation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04349/) (2024)
- [CNOT-Optimal Clifford Synthesis as SAT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00634/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective implementation of high-level quantum gates is essential for practical quantum computing. In this work, we presented, to the best of our knowledge, the first reported 12-CNOT decomposition of the double qubit excitation operator. We compared our new circuit with the previous SOTA 13-CNOT circuits in 4 different metrics. Our new circuit has the lowest CNOT count (12), lowest CNOT depth (8, roughly 27% reduction), and lowest total circuit depth (15, 25% reduction) among all the previous SOTA circuits. With output qubit relabeling, the CNOT depth can be further reduced to 7 (roughly 36% reduction from 11). Further, we only added 2 extra 1q gates (from 11 to 13) compared to the best of the SOTA circuits. As the double qubit excitation operator can be used as a building block hundreds or thousands of times in practical quantum algorithms, any reduction in such primitives compounds over the full circuit, resulting in significant overall resource savings.