Clifford gates (original) (raw)

In quantum computing and quantum information theory, the Clifford gates are the elements of the Clifford group, a set of mathematical transformations which normalize the n-qubit Pauli group, i.e., map tensor products of Pauli matrices to tensor products of Pauli matrices through conjugation. The notion was introduced by Daniel Gottesman and is named after the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford. Quantum circuits that consist of only Clifford gates can be efficiently simulated with a classical computer due to the Gottesman–Knill theorem.