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Completeness of the ZX-Calculus

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abstract

The ZX-Calculus is a graphical language for diagrammatic reasoning in quantum mechanics and quantum information theory. It comes equipped with an equational presentation. We focus here on a very important property of the language: completeness, which roughly ensures the equational theory captures all of quantum mechanics. We first improve on the known-to-be-complete presentation for the so-called Clifford fragment of the language - a restriction that is not universal - by adding some axioms. Thanks to a system of back-and-forth translation between the ZX-Calculus and a third-party complete graphical language, we prove that the provided axiomatisation is complete for the first approximately universal fragment of the language, namely Clifford+T. We then prove that the expressive power of this presentation, though aimed at achieving completeness for the aforementioned restriction, extends beyond Clifford+T, to a class of diagrams that we call linear with Clifford+T constants. We use another version of the third-party language - and an adapted system of back-and-forth translation - to complete the language for the ZX-Calculus as a whole, that is, with no restriction. We briefly discuss the added axioms, and finally, we provide a complete axiomatisation for an altered version of the language which involves an additional generator, making the presentation simpler.

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quant-ph 1

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2026 1

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representative citing papers

Quantum Information Flow under String-Diagram Rewriting

quant-ph · 2026-08-10 · conditional · novelty 6.0

The authors define Coecke flow lines as branch-independent paths through quantum protocol diagrams that survive every semantics-preserving rewrite down to a bare wire.

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  • Quantum Information Flow under String-Diagram Rewriting quant-ph · 2026-08-10 · conditional · none · ref 69 · internal anchor

    The authors define Coecke flow lines as branch-independent paths through quantum protocol diagrams that survive every semantics-preserving rewrite down to a bare wire.