English

Completeness of the ZH-calculus

Quantum Physics 2024-08-07 v2

Abstract

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]\mathbb{Z}[\frac12], 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 RR where 1+11+1 is not a zero-divisor.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.06610,
  title  = {Completeness of the ZH-calculus},
  author = {Miriam Backens and Aleks Kissinger and Hector Miller-Bakewell and John van de Wetering and Sal Wolffs},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.06610},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

68 pages, many many diagrams

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:59:36.465Z