Natural two-qubit gate for quantum computation using the $\mathrm{XY}$ interaction

The two-qubit interaction Hamiltonian of a given physical implementation determines whether or not a two-qubit gate such as the controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate can be realized easily. It can be shown that, e.g., with the $\mathrm{XY}$ interaction more than one two-qubit operation is required in order to realize the CNOT operation. Here we propose a two-qubit gate for the $\mathrm{XY}$ interaction which combines the CNOT and SWAP operations. By using this gate quantum circuits can be implemented efficiently, even if only nearest-neighbor coupling between the qubits is available.