Research & Publications

QuantumCircuitOpt is developed alongside research on mathematical optimization methods for quantum circuit synthesis and compilation. Select a publication to read a short overview and follow its paper links or copy its BibTeX citation. If you find QuantumCircuitOpt useful, we request that you cite the relevant papers.

2025 Provably Optimal Quantum Circuits with Mixed-Integer Programming arXiv preprint · quant-ph

Harsha Nagarajan and Zsolt Szabó

This work develops a depth-aware optimization framework that combines exact mixed-integer programming certificates with scalable heuristics. It introduces hardware-aware objectives, stronger valid inequalities, fidelity-driven approximate synthesis models, and a rolling-horizon method for improving larger circuits.

BibTeX

@misc{nagarajan2025provablyoptimalquantumcircuits,
  title={Provably Optimal Quantum Circuits with Mixed-Integer Programming},
  author={Harsha Nagarajan and Zsolt Szabó},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2510.00649},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={quant-ph},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00649},
}

2022 Exploring Non-Linear Programming Formulations in QuantumCircuitOpt for Optimal Circuit Design Third Workshop on Quantum Computing Software (QCS), SC22

Elena R. Henderson, Harsha Nagarajan, and Carleton Coffrin

This paper studies continuous nonlinear-programming relaxations of the circuit-design model underlying QuantumCircuitOpt. The resulting analysis yields several computational enhancements, including average runtime speedups of up to 11.3×, and identifies opportunities for large-scale gradient-based optimization.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{HendersonNagarajanCoffrin2022,
  title={Exploring Non-Linear Programming Formulations in {QuantumCircuitOpt} for Optimal Circuit Design},
  author={Henderson, Elena R. and Nagarajan, Harsha and Coffrin, Carleton},
  booktitle={2022 IEEE/ACM Third International Workshop on Quantum Computing Software (QCS)},
  pages={36--42},
  year={2022},
  doi={10.1109/QCS56647.2022.00009},
  organization={IEEE}
}

2021 QuantumCircuitOpt: An Open-source Framework for Provably Optimal Quantum Circuit Design Second Workshop on Quantum Computing Software (QCS), SC21

Harsha Nagarajan, Owen Lockwood, and Carleton Coffrin

This paper introduces QuantumCircuitOpt and its mixed-integer optimization approach to synthesizing compact circuits over hardware-native gate sets. It demonstrates optimality-certified decompositions for circuits of up to four qubits and reports gate-count reductions of up to 57% on the studied benchmarks.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{QCOpt_SC2021,
  title={{QuantumCircuitOpt}: An Open-source Framework for Provably Optimal Quantum Circuit Design},
  author={Nagarajan, Harsha and Lockwood, Owen and Coffrin, Carleton},
  booktitle={SC21: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis},
  series={Second Workshop on Quantum Computing Software},
  pages={55--63},
  year={2021},
  doi={10.1109/QCS54837.2021.00010},
  organization={IEEE Computer Society}
}