Symbolic model checking quantum circuits in Maude

This article presents a symbolic approach to model checking quantum circuits using a set of laws from quantum mechanics and basic matrix operations with Dirac notation. We use Maude, a high-level specification/programming language based on rewriting logic, to implement our symbolic approach. As case studies, we use the approach to formally specify several quantum communication protocols in the early work of quantum communication and formally verify their correctness: Superdense Coding, Quantum Teleportation, Quantum Secret Sharing, Entanglement Swapping, Quantum Gate Teleportation, Two Mirror-image Teleportation, and Quantum Network Coding. We demonstrate that our approach/implementation can be a first step toward a general framework to formally specify and verify quantum circuits in Maude. The proposed way to formally specify a quantum circuit makes it possible to describe the quantum circuit in Maude such that the formal specification can be regarded as a series of quantum gate/measurement applications. Once a quantum circuit has been formally specified in the proposed way together with an initial state and a desired property expressed in linear temporal logic (LTL), the proposed model checking technique utilizes a built-in Maude LTL model checker to automatically conduct formal verification that the quantum circuit enjoys the property starting from the initial state.