Equivalent programmable quantum processors

Programmable quantum circuits, or processors, have the advantage over single-purpose quantum circuits that they can be used to perform more than one function. The inputs of a quantum processor consist of two quantum states, the first, the data register, is a state on which an operation is to be performed, and the second, the program, determines the operation to be performed on the data. In this paper we study how to determine whether two different quantum processors perform the same set of operations on the data. We define an equivalence between quantum processors that is quite natural in a circuit model of quantum information processing. Two processors are equivalent if one can be converted into the other by inserting fixed unitary gates at the input and the output of the program register. We then use this definition to find a necessary condition for two processors to be equivalent. We also study the beam splitter as an example of a quantum processor and find that this example suggests that as well as there being an equivalence relation on processors, there may also be a partial ordering.