  Uniformly controlled one-qubit gates are quantum gates which can be
represented as direct sums of two-dimensional unitary operators acting on a
single qubit. We present a quantum gate array which implements any n-qubit gate
of this type using at most 2^{n-1} - 1 controlled-NOT gates, 2^{n-1} one-qubit
gates and a single diagonal n-qubit gate. The circuit is based on the so-called
quantum multiplexor, for which we provide a modified construction. We
illustrate the versatility of these gates by applying them to the decomposition
of a general n-qubit gate and a local state preparation procedure. Moreover, we
study their implementation using only nearest-neighbor gates. We give upper
bounds for the one-qubit and controlled-NOT gate counts for all the
aforementioned applications. In all four cases, the proposed circuit topologies
either improve on or achieve the previously reported upper bounds for the gate
counts. Thus, they provide the most efficient method for general gate
decompositions currently known.

Quantum Physics