Diagrammatic Reasoning with Control as a Constructor, Applications to Quantum Circuits

Abstract:Control is a fundamental concept in quantum and reversible computational models. It enables the conditional application of a transformation to a system, depending on the state of another system. We introduce a general framework for diagrammatic reasoning featuring control as a constructor. To this end, we provide an elementary axiomatization of control functors, extending the standard formalism of PROPs to controlled PROPs. As an application, we show that controlled PROPs facilitate diagrammatic reasoning for quantum circuits by introducing a simple and complete set of relations involving at most three qubits, whereas in the standard PROP setting any complete axiomatization necessarily requires relations acting on arbitrarily many qubits.

arXiv:2508.21756 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2508.21756v4 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.21756 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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