
Optimized Telecloning Circuits: Theory and
Practice of Nine NISQ Clones
Elijah Pelofske∗†, Andreas B¨
artschi∗†, Stephan Eidenbenz†
†CCS-3 Information Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA
∗Corresponding author: epelofske@lanl.gov
Abstract—Although perfect copying of an unknown quantum
state is not possible, approximate cloning is possible in quantum
mechanics. Quantum telecloning is a variant of approximate
quantum cloning which uses quantum teleportation to allow
for the use of classical communication to create physically
separate clones of a quantum state. We present results of a
of 1→9universal, symmetric, optimal quantum telecloning
implementation on a cloud accessible quantum computer - the
Quantinuum H1-1 device. The H1-1 device allows direct creation
of the telecloning protocol due to real time classical if-statements
that are conditional on the mid-circuit measurement outcome of
a Bell measurement. In this implementation, we also provide an
improvement over previous work for the circuit model description
of quantum telecloning, which reduces the required gate depth
and gate count for an all-to-all connectivity. The demonstration
of creating 9approximate clones on a quantum processor is the
largest number of clones that has been generated, telecloning or
otherwise.
Index Terms—NISQ computing, Quantum telecloning, quan-
tum cloning, Bell state, single qubit state tomography
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to the no cloning theorem, perfect copies of an
unknown quantum state can not be made [35]. However,
approximate copies of an unknown state can be made [7]—
this process is referred to as quantum cloning. There are
a large number of variants of quantum cloning algorithms,
and therefore it is helpful to classify these algorithms using
different characteristics. Symmetric quantum cloning means
that all generated clones are identical and therefore have the
same fidelity, whereas asymmetric quantum cloning is where
the clones can be different. Universal quantum cloning is state
independent, i.e., the clone quality is not dependent on the state
being cloned. In state dependent versions of quantum cloning,
on the other hand, the clone quality is dependent on the state
which is cloned [13].
The optimal theoretical approximate clone fidelity limit for
symmetric universal quantum cloning can be exactly computed
[23], [29], and is given in Eq. (1). A fidelity of 1indicates
LA-UR-22-30899; this work was supported by the U.S. Department of
Energy through the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos National
Laboratory is operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National
Nuclear Security Administration of U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No.
89233218CNA000001). We acknowledge the use of IBM Quantum services
for this work. The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not reflect
the official policy or position of IBM or the IBM Quantum team. This research
used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which is a
DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC05-
00OR22725.
that the two quantum states being compared are identical,
whereas a fidelity of 0indicates that the two quantum states are
orthogonal, while a maximally mixed (e.g. completely noisy)
1-qubit state results in a fidelity of 0.5.
FN→M=MN +M+N
M(N+ 2) (1)
A quantum cloning process which produces clones that can
achieve this bound is referred to as optimal [15], [34]. Quan-
tum telecloning is a combination of quantum teleportation
[6] and optimal quantum cloning [23]. Quantum telecloning
allows the distribution of quantum information, specifically
approximate clones of an unknown quantum state, to be
distributed to different parties [14]. In particular, the usage
of classical communication of the measurement of a Bell state
allows different parties (which could be spatially separated) to
conditionally apply quantum operations to their qubits in order
to generate optimal clones of the unknown quantum state.
Algorithm 1details the telecloning process. Quantum cloning
is of particular interest for quantum information processing
and quantum networking [5], [9], [24], [29].
Designing quantum telecloning circuits to run on Noise
Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) [27] equipment is an
open challenge because of the need for optimized, low-depth
circuits due to noise and decoherence on NISQ devices. Using
Dicke state preparation improvements [1]–[4], [12], [16], the
authors of [25] build an explicit circuit model description for
implementing telecloning on NISQ devices. Our contributions
are a significantly improved telecloning circuit over previous
work that we show to be useful on a NISQ device by
generating 9 clones. More precisely, we:
1) Provide an optimized circuit model algorithm of 1→M
optimal, universal, symmetric telecloning for an all-to-
all connectivity.
2) Report experimental results of 1→9quantum tele-
cloning on the Quantinuum H1-1 device, which is the
largest experimental demonstration (in terms of the
number of clones) of optimal universal symmetric clones
generated on a NISQ computer.
We find that (i) our 1→9quantum telecloning circuit has
211 two-qubit gates; (ii) the fidelities we achieve vary across
the nine individual clones and also across the four different
cloned states that we tested, but generally range from 0.55 to
0.67 (theoretical optimum is 19
27 ≈0.7037, see (1)) with an
average of 0.59 across all experiments, which is comparable
arXiv:2210.10164v2 [quant-ph] 30 Nov 2022