Hypergraph Simplification: Linking the Path-sum Approach to the ZH-calculus

Louis Lemonnier
(ENS Paris-Saclay, Université Paris-Saclay)
John van de Wetering
(Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)
Aleks Kissinger
(Oxford University)

The ZH-calculus is a complete graphical calculus for linear maps between qubits that admits a straightforward encoding of hypergraph states and circuits arising from the Toffoli+Hadamard gate set. In this paper, we establish a correspondence between the ZH-calculus and the path-sum formalism, a technique recently introduced by Amy to verify quantum circuits. In particular, we find a bijection between certain canonical forms of ZH-diagrams and path-sum expressions. We then introduce and prove several new simplification rules for the ZH-calculus, which are in direct correspondence to the simplification rules of the path-sum formalism. The relatively opaque path-sum rules are shown to arise naturally from two powerful families of rewrite rules in the ZH-calculus. The first is the extension of the familiar graph-theoretic simplifications based on local complementation and pivoting to their hypergraph-theoretic analogues: hyper-local complementation and hyper-pivoting. The second is the graphical Fourier transform introduced by Kuijpers et al., which enables effective simplification of ZH-diagrams encoding multi-linear phase polynomials with arbitrary real coefficients.

In Benoît Valiron, Shane Mansfield, Pablo Arrighi and Prakash Panangaden: Proceedings 17th International Conference on Quantum Physics and Logic (QPL 2020), Paris, France, June 2 - 6, 2020, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 340, pp. 188–212.
Published: 6th September 2021.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.340.10 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org