Paper detail

Four qubits generated by Clifford gates

The Clifford group is the set of gates generated by the controlled not gates, the Hadamard gate and the P={{1,0},{0,i}} gate. We will say that a n-qubit state is a Clifford state if it can be prepared using Clifford gates. In this paper we study the set of all 4-qubit Clifford states. We prove that there are 293760 states and their entanglement entropy must be either 0, 2/3, 1, 4/3 and 5/3. We also show that any pair of these states can be connected using local gates and at most 3 CNOT gates. We achieve this by splitting the 293760 states into 18 groups where each pair of states in a group can be connected with a local Clifford gate. We then study how the different CNOT gates act on the 18 groups. We also study the Clifford states with real entries under the action of the subgroup C_R of Clifford gates with real entries. This time we show that every pair of Clifford states with real entries can be connected with at most 5 CNOT gates and local gates in C_R. The link https://youtu.be/42MI6ks2_eU leads to a YouTube video that explains the most important results in this paper.