Depicting qudit quantum mechanics and mutually unbiased qudit theories

André Ranchin
(University of Oxford / Imperial College London)

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.

In Bob Coecke, Ichiro Hasuo and Prakash Panangaden: Proceedings of the 11th workshop on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2014), Kyoto, Japan, 4-6th June 2014, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 172, pp. 68–91.
Published: 28th December 2014.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.172.6 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org