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Using the Parity Flow formalism, we show that physical SWAP gates can be eliminated in linear hardware architectures, without increasing the total number of two-qubit operations. This has a significant impact on the execution time of quantum circuits in linear Quantum Charge-Coupled Devices (QCCDs), where SWAP gates are implemented by physically changing the position of the ions. Because SWAP gates are one of the most time-consuming operations in QCCDs, our scheme considerably reduces the runtime of the quantum Fourier transform and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm on all-to-all spin models, compared to circuits generated with standard compilers (TKET and Qiskit). While increasing the problem size (and therefore the number of qubits) typically demands longer runtimes, which are constrained by coherence time, our runtime reduction enables a significant increase in the number of qubits at a given coherence time.

We present a formalism based on tracking the flow of parity quantum information to implement algorithms on devices with limited connectivity without qubit overhead, SWAP operations or shuttling. Instead, we leverage the fact that entangling gates not only manipulate quantum states but can also be exploited to transport quantum information. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by applying it to the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) with $n$ qubits. This improves upon all state-of-the-art implementations of the QFT on a linear nearest-neighbor architecture, resulting in a total circuit depth of ${5n-3}$ and requiring ${n^2-1}$ CNOT gates. For the QAOA, our method outperforms SWAP networks, which are currently the most efficient implementation of the QAOA on a linear architecture. We further demonstrate the potential to balance qubit count against circuit depth by implementing the QAOA on twice the number of qubits using bi-linear connectivity, which approximately halves the circuit depth.