Generalization of Quantum Search Algorithm

Grover's quantum search algorithm is an important landmark discovery in the area of quantum computing that drives a quantum computer from a known initial state(source state) to an unknown final state(target state) by using selective phase inversions of these states. The algorithm is simply a successive iteration of the Grover's search operator, which is a product of selective inversion operators of source and target states. In its original form, Grover's operator performs the selective inversions only on a unique source state and a unique target state. In the generalized version, we make our search operator to perform selective inversions on more than one source and target states. First, we find that the case of selective inversions of two source and two target states can be easily analysed somewhat similar to the case of Grover's algorithm. But unlike Grover's operator, the selective inversions of three source and three target states is not so easy to study analytically and hence we perform numerical calculations on some specific cases. We find that these generalized search operators also give us a successful quantum search as expected.