Optimal realizations of controlled unitary gates

The controlled-not gate and the single qubit gates are considered elementary gates in quantum computing. It is natural to ask how many such elementary gates are needed to implement more elaborate gates or circuits. Recall that a controlled-U gate can be realized with two controlled-not gates and four single qubit gates. We prove that this implementation is optimal if and only if the matrix U satisfies the conditions trU 6= 0, tr(UX) 6= 0, and detU 6= 1. We also derive optimal implementations in the remaining non-generic cases.