A Simplified Stabilizer ZX-calculus

The stabilizer ZX-calculus is a rigorous graphical language for reasoning about quantum mechanics. The language is sound and complete: a stabilizer ZX-diagram can be transformed into another one if and only if these two diagrams represent the same quantum evolution or quantum state. We show that the stabilizer ZX-calculus can be simplified, removing unnecessary equations while keeping only the essential axioms which potentially capture fundamental structures of quantum mechanics. We thus give a significantly smaller set of axioms and prove that meta-rules like ‘colour symmetry’ and ‘upside-down symmetry’, which were considered as axioms in previous versions of the language, can in fact be derived. In particular, we show that the additional symbol and one of the rules which had been recently introduced to keep track of scalars (diagrams with no inputs or outputs) are not necessary.