Constructive quantum Shannon decomposition from Cartan involutions

The work presented here extends upon the best known universal quantum circuit, the Quantum Shannon Decomposition proposed in [Vivek V. Shende, Stephen S. Bullock and Igor Markov, Synthesis of Quantum Logic Circuits, IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst. 25 (6): 1000-1010 (2006)]. We obtain the basis of the circuit's design in a pair of Cartan decompositions. This insight gives a simple constructive algorithm for obtaining the Quantum Shannon Decomposition of a given unitary matrix in terms of the corresponding Cartan involutions.