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arXiv:2307.14223 · Logical Methods in Computer Science

Rewriting and Completeness of Sum-Over-Paths in Dyadic Fragments of Quantum Computing

Renaud Vilmart

Published Mar 7, 2024• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The "Sum-Over-Paths" formalism is a way to symbolically manipulate linear maps that describe quantum systems, and is a tool that is used in formal verification of such systems. We give here a new set of rewrite rules for the formalism, and show that it is complete for "Toffoli-Hadamard", the simplest approximately universal fragment of quantum mechanics. We show that the rewriting is terminating, but not confluent (which is expected from the universality of the fragment). We do so using the connection between Sum-over-Paths and graphical language ZH-calculus, and also show how the axiomatisation translates into the latter. We provide generalisations of the presented rewrite rules, that can prove useful when trying to reduce terms in practice, and we show how to graphically make sense of these new rules. We show how to enrich the rewrite system to reach completeness for the dyadic fragments of quantum computation, used in particular in the Quantum Fourier Transform, and obtained by adding phase gates with dyadic multiples of $\pi$ to the Toffoli-Hadamard gate-set. Finally, we show how to perform sums and concatenation of arbitrary terms, something which is not native in a system designed for analysing gate-based quantum computation, but necessary when considering Hamiltonian-based quantum computation.

DOI
10.46298/lmcs-20(1:20)2024

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The "Sum-Over-Paths" formalism is a way to symbolically manipulate linear maps that describe quantum systems, and is a tool that is used in formal verification of such systems. We give here a new set of rewrite rules for the formalism, and show that it is complete for "Toffoli-Hadamard", the simplest approximately universal fragment of quantum mechanics. We show that the rewriting is terminating, but not confluent (which is expected from the universality of the fragment). We do so using the connection between Sum-over-Paths and graphical language ZH-calculus, and also show how the axiomatisation translates into the latter. We provide generalisations of the presented rewrite rules, that can prove useful when trying to reduce terms in practice, and we show how to graphically make sense of these new rules. We show how to enrich the rewrite system to reach completeness for the dyadic fragments of quantum computation, used in particular in the Quantum Fourier Transform, and obtained by adding phase gates with dyadic multiples of π\piπ to the Toffoli-Hadamard gate-set. Finally, we show how to perform sums and concatenation of arbitrary terms, something which is not native in a system designed for analysing gate-based quantum computation, but necessary when considering Hamiltonian-based quantum computation.
The "Sum-Over-Paths" formalism is a way to symbolically manipulate linear maps that describe quantum systems, and is a tool that is used in formal verification of such systems. We give here a new set of rewrite rules for the formalism, and show that it is complete for "Toffoli-Hadamard", the simplest approximately universal fragment of quantum mechanics. We show that the rewriting is terminating, but not confluent (which is expected from the universality of the fragment). We do so using the connection between Sum-over-Paths and graphical language ZH-Calculus, and also show how the axiomatisation translates into the latter. Finally, we show how to enrich the rewrite system to reach completeness for the dyadic fragments of quantum computation - obtained by adding phase gates with dyadic multiples of π to the Toffoli-Hadamard gate-set - used in particular in the Quantum Fourier Transform.
The ZH-calculus is a complete graphical calculus for linear maps between qubits that admits a straightforward encoding of hypergraph states and circuits arising from the Toffoli+Hadamard gate set. In this paper, we establish a correspondence between the ZH-calculus and the path-sum formalism, a technique recently introduced by Amy to verify quantum circuits. In particular, we find a bijection between certain canonical forms of ZH-diagrams and path-sum expressions. We then introduce and prove several new simplification rules for the ZH-calculus, which are in direct correspondence to the simplification rules of the path-sum formalism. The relatively opaque path-sum rules are shown to arise naturally from two powerful families of rewrite rules in the ZH-calculus. The first is the extension of the familiar graph-theoretic simplifications based on local complementation and pivoting to their hypergraph-theoretic analogues: hyper-local complementation and hyper-pivoting. The second is the graphical Fourier transform introduced by Kuijpers et al., which enables effective simplification of ZH-diagrams encoding multi-linear phase polynomials with arbitrary real coefficients.
There are various gate sets used for describing quantum computation. A particularly popular one consists of Clifford gates and arbitrary single-qubit phase gates. Computations in this gate set can be elegantly described by the ZX-calculus, a graphical language for a class of string diagrams describing linear maps between qubits. The ZX-calculus has proven useful in a variety of areas of quantum information, but is less suitable for reasoning about operations outside its natural gate set such as multi-linear Boolean operations like the Toffoli gate. In this paper we study the ZH-calculus, an alternative graphical language of string diagrams that does allow straightforward encoding of Toffoli gates and other more complicated Boolean logic circuits. We find a set of simple rewrite rules for this calculus and show it is complete with respect to matrices over Z[12] , which correspond to the approximately universal Toffoli+Hadamard gateset. Furthermore, we construct an extended version of the ZH-calculus that is complete with respect to matrices over any ring R where 1+1 is not a zero-divisor.
The ZH-calculus is a graphical calculus for linear maps between qubits that allows a natural representation of the Toffoli+Hadamard gate set. The original version of the calculus, which allows every generator to be labelled by an arbitrary complex number, was shown to be complete by Backens and Kissinger. Even though the calculus is complete, this does not mean it allows one to easily reason in restricted settings such as is the case in quantum computing. In this paper we study the fragment of the ZH-calculus that is phase-free, and thus is closer aligned to physically implementable maps. We present a modified rule-set for the phase-free ZH-calculus and show that it is complete. We further discuss the minimality of this rule-set and we give an intuitive interpretation of the rules. Our completeness result follows by reducing to Vilmart's rule-set for the phase-free ΔΔΔZX-calculus.
We show that the formalism of "Sum-Over-Path" (SOP), used for symbolically representing linear maps or quantum operators, together with a proper rewrite system, has a structure of dagger-compact PROP. Several consequences arise from this observation: 1) Morphisms of SOP are very close to the diagrams of the graphical calculus called ZH-Calculus, so we give a system of interpretation between the two; 2) A construction, called the discard construction, can be applied to enrich the formalism so that, in particular, it can represent the quantum measurement. We also enrich the rewrite system so as to get the completeness of the Clifford fragments of both the initial formalism and its enriched version.
Abstract We show that the formalism of “Sum-Over-Path” (SOP), used for symbolically representing linear maps or quantum operators, together with a proper rewrite system, has the structure of a dagger-compact PROP. Several consequences arise from this observation: – Morphisms of SOP are very close to the diagrams of the graphical calculus called ZH-Calculus, so we give a system of interpretation between the two – A construction, called the discard construction, can be applied to enrich the formalism so that, in particular, it can represent the quantum measurement. We also enrich the rewrite system so as to get the completeness of the Clifford fragments of both the initial formalism and its enriched version.