Skip to main content
Glossary

Quantum glossary

Universal gate set

Also: clifford+t, native gates

A small set of gates from which any quantum computation can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy.

A common choice is {H, S, T, CNOT}. Clifford gates alone (H, S, CNOT) can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer; adding the T gate is what makes the set universal — and what makes fault-tolerant computation expensive.

See it for yourself

Related terms

  • CNOT gate — A two-qubit gate that flips the target qubit if and only if the control qubit is |1⟩.
  • Hadamard gate — The single-qubit gate that turns |0⟩ into an equal superposition of |0⟩ and |1⟩, and back again.
  • Transpilation — Rewriting a circuit into the native gates and connectivity of a specific device, while optimising it.