English

Depicting qudit quantum mechanics and mutually unbiased qudit theories

Quantum Physics 2014-12-31 v3

Abstract

We generalize the ZX calculus to quantum systems of dimension higher than two. The resulting calculus is sound and universal for quantum mechanics. We define the notion of a mutually unbiased qudit theory and study two particular instances of these theories in detail: qudit stabilizer quantum mechanics and Spekkens-Schreiber toy theory for dits. The calculus allows us to analyze the structure of qudit stabilizer quantum mechanics and provides a geometrical picture of qudit stabilizer theory using D-toruses, which generalizes the Bloch sphere picture for qubit stabilizer quantum mechanics. We also use our framework to describe generalizations of Spekkens toy theory to higher dimensional systems. This gives a novel proof that qudit stabilizer quantum mechanics and Spekkens-Schreiber toy theory for dits are operationally equivalent in three dimensions. The qudit pictorial calculus is a useful tool to study quantum foundations, understand the relationship between qubit and qudit quantum mechanics, and provide a novel, high level description of quantum information protocols.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.1288,
  title  = {Depicting qudit quantum mechanics and mutually unbiased qudit theories},
  author = {André Ranchin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.1288},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

In Proceedings QPL 2014, arXiv:1412.8102