C_3, semi-Clifford and genralized semi-Clifford operations

Fault-tolerant quantum computation is a basic problem in quantum computation, and teleportation is one of the main techniques in this theory. Using teleportation on stabilizer codes, the most well-known quantum codes, Pauli gates and Clifford operators can be applied fault-tolerantly. Indeed, this technique can be generalized for an extended set of gates, the so called C_k hierarchy gates, introduced by Gottesman and Chuang (Nature, 402, 390-392). C_k gates are a generalization of Clifford operators, but our knowledge of these sets is not as rich as our knowledge of Clifford gates. Zeng et al. in (Phys. Rev. A 77, 042313) raise the question of the relation between C_k hierarchy and the set of semi-Clifford and generalized semi-Clifford operators. They conjecture that any C_k gate is a generalized semi-Clifford operator. In this paper, we prove this conjecture for k = 3. Using the techniques that we develop, we obtain more insight on how to characterize C_3 gates. Indeed, the more we understand C_3, the more intuition we have on C_k, k ≥ 4, and then we have a way of attacking the conjecture for larger k.