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arXiv:2302.04212 · ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)

Complete Graphical Language for Hermiticity-Preserving Superoperators

Titouan Carette, Timothée Hoffreumon, Émile Larroque, Renaud Vilmart

Published Jun 26, 2023• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Universal and complete graphical languages have been successfully designed for pure state quantum mechanics, corresponding to linear maps between Hilbert spaces, and mixed states quantum mechanics, corresponding to completely positive superoperators. In this paper, we go one step further and present a universal and complete graphical language for Hermiticity-preserving superoperators. Such a language opens the possibility of diagrammatic compositional investigations of antilinear transformations featured in various physical situations, such as the Choi-Jamiołkowski isomorphism, spin-flip, or entanglement witnesses. Our construction relies on an extension of the ZW-calculus exhibiting a normal form for Hermitian matrices.

DOI
10.1109/lics56636.2023.10175712

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Universal and complete graphical languages have been successfully designed for pure state quantum mechanics, corresponding to linear maps between Hilbert spaces, and mixed states quantum mechanics, corresponding to completely positive superoperators. In this paper, we go one step further and present a universal and complete graphical language for Hermiticity-preserving superoperators. Such a language opens the possibility of diagrammatic compositional investigations of antilinear transformations featured in various physical situations, such as the Choi-Jamiołkowski isomorphism, spin-flip, or entanglement witnesses. Our construction relies on an extension of the ZW-calculus exhibiting a normal form for Hermitian matrices.
There exist several graphical languages for quantum information processing, like quantum circuits, ZX-calculus, ZW-calculus, and so on. Each of these languages forms a †-symmetric monoidal category (†-SMC) and comes with an interpretation functor to the †-SMC of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In recent years, one of the main achievements of the categorical approach to quantum mechanics has been to provide several equational theories for most of these graphical languages, making them complete for various fragments of pure quantum mechanics. We address the question of how to extend these languages beyond pure quantum mechanics to reason about mixed states and general quantum operations, i.e., completely positive maps. Intuitively, such an extension relies on the axiomatisation of a discard map that allows one to get rid of a quantum system, an operation that is not allowed in pure quantum mechanics. We introduce a new construction, the discard construction , which transforms any †-symmetric monoidal category into a symmetric monoidal category equipped with a discard map. Roughly speaking this construction consists in making any isometry causal. Using this construction, we provide an extension for several graphical languages that we prove to be complete for general quantum operations. However, this construction fails for some fringe cases like Clifford+T quantum mechanics, as the category does not have enough isometries.
There exist several graphical languages for quantum information processing, like quantum circuits, ZX-Calculus, ZW-Calculus, etc. Each of these languages forms a dagger-symmetric monoidal category (dagger-SMC) and comes with an interpretation functor to the dagger-SMC of (finite dimension) Hilbert spaces. In the recent years, one of the main achievements of the categorical approach to quantum mechanics has been to provide several equational theories for most of these graphical languages, making them complete for various fragments of pure quantum mechanics. We address the question of the extension of these languages beyond pure quantum mechanics, in order to reason on mixed states and general quantum operations, i.e. completely positive maps. Intuitively, such an extension relies on the axiomatisation of a discard map which allows one to get rid of a quantum system, operation which is not allowed in pure quantum mechanics. We introduce a new construction, the discard construction, which transforms any dagger-symmetric monoidal category into a symmetric monoidal category equipped with a discard map. Roughly speaking this construction consists in making any isometry causal. Using this construction we provide an extension for several graphical languages that we prove to be complete for general quantum operations. However this construction fails for some fringe cases like the Clifford+T quantum mechanics, as the category does not have enough isometries.
We describe a graphical calculus for completely positive maps and in doing so review the theory of open quantum systems and other fundamental primitives of quantum information theory using the language of tensor networks. In particular we demonstrate the construction of tensor networks to pictographically represent the Liouville-superoperator, Choi-matrix, process-matrix, Kraus, and system-environment representations for the evolution of quantum states, review how these representations interrelate, and illustrate how graphical manipulations of the tensor networks may be used to concisely transform between them. To further demonstrate the utility of the presented graphical calculus we include several examples where we provide arguably simpler graphical proofs of several useful quantities in quantum information theory including the composition and contraction of multipartite channels, a condition for whether an arbitrary bipartite state may be used for ancilla assisted process tomography, and the derivation of expressions for the average gate fidelity and entanglement fidelity of a channel in terms of each of the different representations of the channel.
Finite-dimensional quantum theory serves as the theoretical foundation for quantum information and computation. Mathematically, it is formalized in the category FHilb, comprising all finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces and linear maps between them. However, there has not been a graphical language for FHilb which is both universal and complete and thus incorporates a set of rules rich enough to derive any equality of the underlying formalism solely by rewriting. In this paper, we introduce the qufinite ZXW calculus - a graphical language for reasoning about finite-dimensional quantum theory. We set up a unique normal form to represent an arbitrary tensor and prove the completeness of this calculus by demonstrating that any qufinite ZXW diagram can be rewritten into its normal form. This result implies the equivalence of the qufinite ZXW calculus and the category FHilb, leading to a purely diagrammatic framework for finite-dimensional quantum theory with the same reasoning power. In addition, we identify several domains where the application of the qufinite ZXW calculus holds promise. These domains include spin networks, interacting mixed-dimensional systems in quantum chemistry, quantum programming, high-level description of quantum algorithms, and mixed-dimensional quantum computing. Our work paves the way for a comprehensive diagrammatic description of quantum physics, opening the doors of this area to the wider public.
We describe a graphical calculus for completely positive maps and in doing so review the theory of open quantum systems and other fundamental primitives of quantum information theory using the language of tensor networks. In particular we demonstrate the construction of tensor networks to pictographically represent the Liouville-superoperator, Choi-matrix, process-matrix, Kraus, and system-environment representations for the evolution of quantum states, review how these representations interrelate, and illustrate how graphical manipulations of the tensor networks may be used to concisely transform between them. To further demonstrate the utility of the presented graphical calculus we include several examples where we provide arguably simpler graphical proofs of several useful quantities in quantum information theory including the composition and contraction of multipartite channels, a condition for whether an arbitrary bipartite state may be used for ancilla assisted process tomography, and the derivation of expressions for the average gate fidelity and entanglement fidelity of a channel in terms of each of the different representations of the channel.