Efficient discrete approximations of quantum gates

Quantum compiling addresses the problem of approximating an arbitrary quantum gate with a string of gates drawn from a particular finite set. It has been shown that this is possible for almost all choices of base sets and, furthermore, that the number of gates required for precision epsilon is only polynomial in log 1/epsilon. Here we prove that using certain sets of base gates quantum compiling requires a string length that is linear in log 1/epsilon, a result which matches the lower bound from counting volume up to constant factor. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.