Exact quantum decision diagrams with scaling guarantees for Clifford+$T$ circuits and beyond
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.17775 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 19 Feb 2026] Title:Exact quantum decision diagrams with scaling guarantees for Clifford+$T$ circuits and beyond Authors:Arend-Jan Quist, Tim Coopmans, Alfons Laarman View a PDF of the paper titled Exact quantum decision diagrams with scaling guarantees for Clifford+$T$ circuits and beyond, by Arend-Jan Quist and 2 other authors View PDF Abstract:A decision diagram (DD) is a graph-like data structure for homomorphic compression of Boolean and pseudo-Boolean functions. Over the past decades, decision diagrams have been successfully applied to verification, linear algebra, stochastic reasoning, and quantum circuit analysis. Floating-point errors have, however, significantly slowed down practical implementations of real- and complex-valued decision diagrams. In the context of quantum computing, attempts to mitigate this numerical instability have thus far lacked theoretical scaling guarantees and have had only limited success in practice. Here, we focus on the analysis of quantum circuits consisting of Clifford gates and $T$ gates (a common universal gate set). We first hand-craft an algebraic representation for complex numbers, which replace the floating point coefficients in a decision diagram. Then, we prove that the sizes of these algebraic representations are linearly bounded in the number of $T$ gates and qubits, and constant in the number of Clifford gates. Furthermore, we prove that both the runtime and the number of nodes of decision diagrams are upper bounded as $2^t \cdot poly(g, n)$, where $t$ ($g$) is the number of $t$ gates (Clifford gates) and $n$ the number of qubits. Our proofs are based on a $T$-count dependent characterization of the density matrix entries of quantum states produced by circuits with Clifford+$T$ gates, and uncover a connection between a quantum state's stabilizer nullity and its decision diagram width. With an open source implementation, we demonstrate that our exact method resolves the inaccuracies occurring in floating-point-based counterparts and can outperform them due to lower node counts. Our contributions are, to the best of our knowledge, the first scaling guarantees on the runtime of (exact) quantum decision diagram simulation for a universal gate set. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2602.17775 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.17775v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.17775 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Arend-Jan Quist [view email] [v1] Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:16:30 UTC (90 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Exact quantum decision diagrams with scaling guarantees for Clifford+$T$ circuits and beyond, by Arend-Jan Quist and 2 other authorsView PDFTeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)