When is the Clifford hierarchy generalized semi-Clifford?

Abstract

We study semi-Clifford and generalized semi-Clifford structures in the Clifford hierarchy as a function of hierarchy level $k$ and qubit number $n$. We show that $\mathcal{C}_k(n)$ is semi-Clifford if and only if $k\le2$, $n\le2$, or $k=3$ and $n\le6$. We also establish that $\mathcal{C}_k(n)$ is generalized semi-Clifford when $k\le4$ or $n\le3$ and construct counterexamples when $k,n \geq 5$. For $n=4$ and $k\ge5$, we show that every gate defined over $\mathbb{Q}(i)$ up to a scalar is generalized semi-Clifford, reduce the general case to a single level, and propose a strategy to prove our conjecture that $\mathcal{C}_k(n)$ is generalized semi-Clifford if and only if $k\le4$ or $n\le4$. Lastly, we go beyond this structure by introducing $n_c$-generalized semi-Clifford gates, which we show are exactly the gates of the form $\sum_x|π(x)\rangle\langle x|\otimes V_x$ up to Clifford gates on both sides, where $π$ permutes the computational basis states of $n_c$ control qubits. We conjecture that for $k\ge3$ every gate in $\mathcal{C}_k(n)$ has this form for some $n_c\ge1$ with every $V_x\in\mathcal{C}_{k-3}(n-n_c)$, refining the conjecture of Zeng, Chen, and Chuang.