Counting Abelian Squares for a Problem in Quantum Computing

Abstract

In a recent work I developed a formula for efficiently calculating the number of abelian squares of length $t+t$ over an alphabet of size $d$, where $d$ may be very large. Here I show how the expressiveness of a certain class of parameterized quantum circuits can be reduced to the problem of counting abelian squares over a large alphabet, and use the recently developed formula to efficiently calculate this quantity.