Implementability of two-qubit unitary operations over the butterfly network and the ladder network with free classical communication
We investigate distributed implementation of two-qubit unitary operations over two primitive networks, the butterfly network and the ladder network, as a first step to apply network coding for quantum computation. By classifying two-qubit unitary operations in terms of the Kraus-Cirac number, the number of non-zero parameters describing the global part of two-qubit unitary operations, we analyze which class of two-qubit unitary operations is implementable over these networks with free classical communication. For the butterfly network, we show that two classes of two-qubit unitary operations, which contain all Clifford, controlled-unitary and matchgate operations, are implementable over the network. For the ladder network, we show that two-qubit unitary operations are implementable over the network if and only if their Kraus-Cirac number do not exceed the number of the bridges of the ladder.