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ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)

A Near-Minimal Axiomatisation of ZX-Calculus for Pure Qubit Quantum Mechanics

Renaud Vilmart

Published Jun 1, 2019• 53 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/lics.2019.8785765

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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.
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 lacked 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.
The ZX-Calculus is a graphical language for diagrammatic reasoning in quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. It comes equipped with an equational presentation. We focus here on a very important property of the language: completeness, which roughly ensures the equational theory captures all of quantum mechanics. We first improve on the known-to-be-complete presentation for the so-called Clifford fragment of the language - a restriction that is not universal - by adding some axioms. Thanks to a system of back-and-forth translation between the ZX-Calculus and a third-party complete graphical language, we prove that the provided axiomatisation is complete for the first approximately universal fragment of the language, namely Clifford+T. We then prove that the expressive power of this presentation, though aimed at achieving completeness for the aforementioned restriction, extends beyond Clifford+T, to a class of diagrams that we call linear with Clifford+T constants. We use another version of the third-party language - and an adapted system of back-and-forth translation - to complete the language for the ZX-Calculus as a whole, that is, with no restriction. We briefly discuss the added axioms, and finally, we provide a complete axiomatisation for an altered version of the language which involves an additional generator, making the presentation simpler.
The ZX-Calculus is a graphical language for diagrammatic reasoning in quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. An axiomatisation has recently been proven to be complete for an approximatively universal fragment of quantum mechanics, the so-called Clifford+T fragment. We focus here on the expressive power of this axiomatisation beyond Clifford+T Quantum mechanics. We consider the full pure qubit quantum mechanics, and mainly prove two results: (i) First, the axiomatisation for Clifford+T quantum mechanics is also complete for all equations involving some kind of linear diagrams. The linearity of the diagrams reflects the phase group structure, an essential feature of the ZX-calculus. In particular all the axioms of the ZX-calculus are involving linear diagrams. (ii) We also show that the axiomatisation for Clifford+T is not complete in general but can be completed by adding a single (non linear) axiom, providing a simpler axiomatisation of the ZX-calculus for pure quantum mechanics than the one recently introduced by Ng&Wang.
ZX-calculus is a graphical language for quantum computing which is complete in the sense that calculation in matrices can be done in a purely diagrammatic way. However, all previous universally complete axiomatisations of ZX-calculus have included at least one rule involving trigonometric functions such as sin and cos which makes it difficult for application purpose. In this paper we give an algebraic complete axiomatisation of ZX-calculus instead such that there are only ring operations involved for phases. With this algebraic axiomatisation of ZX-calculus, we are able to establish for the first time a simple translation of diagrams from another graphical language called ZH-calculus and to derive all the ZX-translated rules of ZH-calculus. As a consequence, we have a great benefit that all techniques obtained in ZH-calculus can be transplanted to ZX-calculus, which can't be obtained by just using the completeness of ZX-calculus.
We introduce the first complete and approximately universal diagrammatic language for quantum mechanics. We make the ZX-Calculus, a diagrammatic language introduced by Coecke and Duncan, complete for the so-called Clifford+T quantum mechanics by adding two new axioms to the language. The completeness of the ZX-Calculus for Clifford+T quantum mechanics -- also called the π/4-fragment of the ZX-Calculus -- was one of the main open questions in categorical quantum mechanics. We prove the completeness of this fragment using the recently studied ZW-Calculus, a calculus dealing with integer matrices. We also prove that the π/4-fragment of the ZX-Calculus represents exactly all the matrices over some finite dimensional extension of the ring of dyadic rationals.
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.