(A Variant of) Clifford Circuit Synthesis is NP-Complete

Abstract: Optimal circuit synthesis is the problem of finding the shortest-depth circuit representation of a given functionality with respect to a pre-specified elementary gate set. This is a central problem in both quantum and classical hardware design. While the classical version is very well understood -- both in terms of heuristics and rigorous hardness assertions -- much less is known about optimal quantum circuit synthesis. We focus on optimal Clifford circuit synthesis, for which various heuristics are known, e.g. via reduction to 3-SAT. Our main result supplies a matching hardness result: a variant of optimal Clifford synthesis is NP-hard. The proof proceeds in two parts: (i) reduce 3-edge colorability on 3-regular graphs to a circuit synthesis problem that only involves CZ gates, (ii) prove that the availability of additional elementary Clifford gates -- most notably: Hadamard, phase and CNOT -- cannot lead to further improvements of the optimal circuit depth. Our work sharpens the complexity-theoretic understanding of Clifford circuits: simulation and equivalence checking are in P, whereas deciding whether a Clifford unitary admits an implementation within a prescribed depth is NP-complete.