Grand Unification of All Discrete Wigner Functions on $d \times d$ Phase Space
Abstract
Wigner functions help visualise quantum states and dynamics while supporting quantitative analysis in quantum information. In the discrete setting, many inequivalent constructions coexist for each Hilbert-space dimension. This fragmentation obscures which features are fundamental and which are artefacts of representation. We introduce a stencil-based framework that exhausts all possible discrete Wigner functions for a single -dimensional quantum system (including a novel one for even ), subsuming known forms. We also give explicit invertible linear maps between definitions within the same , enabling direct comparison of operational properties and exposing representation dependence.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.09353,
title = {Grand Unification of All Discrete Wigner Functions on $d \times d$ Phase Space},
author = {Lucky K. Antonopoulos and Dominic G. Lewis and Jack Davis and Nicholas Funai and Nicolas C. Menicucci},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.09353},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
(v4) 8 Pages, 2 figures. Minor edits. Version published in PRA. (V3) 8 Pages, 2 figures. Rewritten for clarity, with the addition of new results. (v2) 8 pages, 2 figures. Theorem 5 clarified. Added a reference. Fixed typos. (v1) 8 pages, 2 figures