Quantum reversibility and a new model of quantum automaton

This article is an attempt to generalize the classical theory of reversible computing, principally developed by Bennet [IBM J. Res. Develop., 17(1973)] and by Fredkin and Toffoli [Internat. J. Theoret. Phys., 21(1982)], to the quantum case. This is a fundamental step towards the construction of a quantum computer because a time efficient quantum computation is a reversible physical process. The paper is organized as follows. The first section reviews the classical theory of reversible computing. In the second section it is showed that the designs used in the classical framework to decrease the consumption of space cannot be generalized to the quantum case; it is also suggested that quantum computing is generally more demanding of space than classical computing. In the last section a new model of fully quantum and reversible automaton is proposed. The computational power of this automaton is at least equal to that of classical automata. Some conclusion are drawn in the last section.