Floating point representations in quantum circuit synthesis

We provide a non-deterministic quantum protocol that approximates the single qubit rotations R-x (2 phi(2)(1)phi(2)(2)) using R-x (2 phi(1)) and R-x (2 phi(2)) and a constant number of Clifford and T operations. We then use this method to construct a 'floating point' implementation of a small rotation wherein we use the aforementioned method to construct the exponent part of the rotation and also to combine it with a mantissa. This causes the cost of the synthesis to depend more strongly on the relative (rather than absolute) precision required. We analyze the mean and variance of the T-count required to use our techniques and provide new lower bounds for the T-count for ancilla free synthesis of small single-qubit axial rotations. We further show that our techniques can use ancillas to beat these lower bounds with high probability. We also discuss the T-depth of our method and see that the vast majority of the cost of the resultant circuits can be shifted to parallel computation paths.