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arXiv:2608.14872

Minimality of the Pure Qubit ZX Calculus

Harry K. Stoltz, Renaud Vilmart

quant-phSubmitted Aug 14, 2026• Announced Aug 18, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Aug 24, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Aug 14, 2026v2 · Aug 24, 2026v3 · Sep 6, 2026
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Abstract

The ZX calculus is a graphical language for reasoning about quantum processes. In this paper, we develop a minimal pure-qubit ZX calculus based on the work of Vilmart [arXiv:1812.09114], Backens, Perdrix, and Wang [arXiv:1709.08903], and Stoltz [arXiv:2606.12383]. This resolves a problem that has remained open for nearly a decade, since completeness was first proved. Specifically, we show that $(I_r)$ is derivable and establish the necessity of $(B)$ and $(I_g)$, yielding two complete and minimal rulesets.

Comments
28 pages, 3 figures

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The ZX calculus is a graphical language for reasoning about quantum processes. In this paper, we develop a minimal pure-qubit ZX calculus based on the work of Vilmart [arXiv:1812.09114], Backens, Perdrix, and Wang [arXiv:1709.08903], and Stoltz [arXiv:2606.12383]. This resolves a problem that has remained open for nearly a decade, since completeness was first proved. Specifically, we show that (Ir)(I_r)(Ir​) is derivable and establish the necessity of (B)(B)(B) and (Ig)(I_g)(Ig​), yielding two complete and minimal rulesets.
The stabilizer ZX-calculus is a rigorous graphical language for reasoning about quantum mechanics. The language is sound and complete: one can transform a stabilizer ZX-diagram into another one using the graphical rewrite rules if and only if these two diagrams represent the same quantum evolution or quantum state. We previously showed that the stabilizer ZX-calculus can be simplified by reducing the number of rewrite rules, without losing the property of completeness [Backens, Perdrix & Wang, EPTCS 236:1--20, 2017]. Here, we show that most of the remaining rules of the language are indeed necessary. We do however leave as an open question the necessity of two rules. These include, surprisingly, the bialgebra rule, which is an axiomatisation of complementarity, the cornerstone of the ZX-calculus. Furthermore, we show that a weaker ambient category -- a braided autonomous category instead of the usual compact closed category -- is sufficient to recover the meta rule 'only connectivity matters', even without assuming any symmetries of the generators.
Recent developments in the ZX-Calculus have resulted in complete axiomatisations first for an approximately universal restriction of the language, and then for the whole language. The main drawbacks were that the axioms that were added to achieve completeness were numerous, tedious to manipulate and lacking a physical interpretation. We present in this paper two complete axiomatisations for the general ZX-Calculus, that we believe are optimal, in that all their equations are necessary and moreover have a nice physical interpretation. To do so, we introduce the singular-value decomposition of a ZX-diagram, and use it to show that all the rules of the former axiomatisation are provable with the new one.
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.
The stabilizer ZX-calculus is a rigorous graphical language for reasoning about quantum mechanics. The language is sound and complete: one can transform a stabilizer ZX-diagram into another one using the graphical rewrite rules if and only if these two diagrams represent the same quantum evolution or quantum state. We previously showed that the stabilizer ZX-calculus can be simplified by reducing the number of rewrite rules, without losing the property of completeness [Backens, Perdrix & Wang, EPTCS 236:1--20, 2017]. Here, we show that most of the remaining rules of the language are indeed necessary. We do however leave as an open question the necessity of two rules. These include, surprisingly, the bialgebra rule, which is an axiomatisation of complementarity, the cornerstone of the ZX-calculus. Furthermore, we show that a weaker ambient category -- a braided autonomous category instead of the usual compact closed category -- is sufficient to recover the meta rule 'only connectivity matters', even without assuming any symmetries of the generators.
The stabilizer fragment of the ZX calculus is amongst the most important fragments of the theory. Crucially, the stabilizer calculus can be described by a small collection of rewrites, most of which have been shown to be necessary by Backens--Perdrix--Wang (arXiv:1709.08903). However, two rules, describing the red/green compact-structure coincidence and the important bialgebra law, had not been shown to be necessary. We present two alternate interpretations, showing that both of these rules are individually necessary. Thus, this resolves a problem which has remained open for over a decade, and gives the first complete, minimal ruleset for the stabilizer ZX Calculus.