Completeness for Fault Equivalence of Clifford ZX Diagrams

Abstract:Two circuits are considered to be equivalent under noise if the effect of faults on one circuit is no worse than the effect of faults on the other circuit. We call this relationship fault equivalence. Fault equivalence offers a way to transform circuits while provably preserving their fault-tolerant properties, enabling a framework for fault-tolerant circuit synthesis and optimisation that is correct by construction. The ZX calculus offers a diagrammatic way to represent and reason about quantum circuits and is a useful tool for manipulating circuits while preserving fault equivalence. For this, the usual set of ZX rewrites has to be restricted to not only preserve the underlying linear map represented by the diagram, but also fault equivalence. In this work, we provide a set of ZX rewrites that are sound and complete for fault equivalence of Clifford ZX diagrams. This means that any equivalence that can be derived using the proposed rules is certain to be correct, and any correct equivalence can be derived using only these rules. For this, we utilise diagrammatic constructions called fault gadgets to reason about arbitrary, possibly correlated Pauli faults in ZX diagrams. Fault gadgets allow us to separate the diagram into a fault-free part, which captures the noise-free behaviour of a diagram, and a noisy part that enumerates the effects of all possible faults. Using this, we provide a unique normal form for ZX diagrams under noise and show that any diagram can be brought into this normal form using our proposed rule set. Leveraging the constructive nature of our proof of completeness, we implemented a software library to check whether two ZX diagrams with given noise models are fault-equivalent.

arXiv:2510.08477 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2510.08477v4 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.08477 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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