A Solovay-Kitaev theorem for quantum signal processing

Abstract: Quantum signal processing (QSP) studies quantum circuits interleaving known unitaries (the phases) and unknown unitaries encoding a hidden scalar (the signal). For a wide class of functions one can quickly compute the phases applying a desired function to the signal; surprisingly, this ability can be shown to unify many quantum algorithms. A separate, basic subfield in quantum computing is gate approximation: among its results, the Solovay-Kitaev theorem (SKT) establishes an equivalence between the universality of a gate set and its ability to efficiently approximate other gates. In this work we prove an 'SKT for QSP,' showing that the density of parameterized circuit ans\"atze in classes of functions implies the existence of short circuits approximating desired functions. This is quite distinct from a pointwise application of the usual SKT, and yields a suite of independently interesting 'lifted' variants of standard SKT proof techniques. Our method furnishes alternative, flexible proofs for results in QSP, extends simply to ans\"atze for which standard QSP proof methods fail, and establishes a formal intersection between QSP and gate approximation.