A Cohomological Characterization of the Clifford Hierarchy

Abstract

The Clifford hierarchy plays a central role in fault-tolerant quantum computation, but its higher levels remain only partially understood. Recent work on quantum higher order Fourier analysis characterizes membership in the Clifford hierarchy using quantum derivatives, but does not provide an explicit description of the individual levels. In this work, we address this problem by showing that the collection of quantum derivatives of a unitary operator forms a non-abelian \(1\)-cocycle, and conversely that every such \(1\)-cocycle arises from a unitary operator. This yields a recursive cohomological characterization of the Clifford hierarchy. We then specialize this framework to the third level and decompose the cocycle data into symplectic, affine, and phase components, each admitting a cohomological interpretation. As applications, we give a new proof that every two-qudit gate in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy is semi-Clifford, and prove for the first time that every three-qudit gate in the third level is semi-Clifford.

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