Hybrid Qubit-Rotor Quantum Systems: Clifford Structure, Universal Control, and Applications
A $U(1)$ quantum rotor pairs a periodic angle with an integer-valued conjugate momentum, and occurs in molecular rotation, superconducting phase-charge circuits, and compact gauge fields. Coupling such a rotor coherently to qubits gives a hybrid register whose control structure is not inherited from either the oscillator-qubit or the qudit case. We develop a Clifford theory, together with a universal-control result, for registers of $n$ qubits and $r$ rotors. We classify all automorphisms of the hybrid phase space $\mathbb{F}_2^{2n}\times\mathbb{Z}^r\times\mathbb{T}^r$ that preserve the Weyl commutation relations, and give an explicit finite Clifford circuit for each one. The classification is directional: rotor momentum parity may control qubit Pauli operations within the Clifford group, while every nonzero qubit-controlled rotor momentum shift is non-Clifford. It also yields normal forms for the mixed qubit-rotor couplings and the exact minimum number of elementary mixed gates needed to synthesize them. Adding a rotor cosine potential and one fixed qubit-rotor conditional phase to the local Clifford operations gives universal control on the full Hilbert space in the strong operator topology. We then apply this structure in three settings: an exact controlled-shift realization of gauge-covariant matter hopping, which is necessarily non-Clifford; rotor phase estimation with direct angle readout and probe optimization under momentum-support and energy constraints; and finite Fourier transforms on rotor momentum codes, where the one-rotor transform for $d=2^s$ compiles into $O(s)$ momentum-selective and controlled-shift instructions and each cross-register Fourier factor is implemented by one quadratic rotor Clifford gate.