# Discrete Wigner Formalism for Qubits and Non-Contextuality of Clifford Gates on Qubit Stabilizer States

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a three-generator Wigner-Weyl-Moyal formalism for qubits, enabling a non-negative, non-contextual hidden variable description of Clifford gates on stabilizer states, contrasting with previous two-generator approaches.

## Contribution

It generalizes the Wigner formalism to three generators for qubits, showing Clifford gates act as permutations and enabling non-negative distributions, revealing non-contextuality in qubit stabilizer states.

## Key findings

- Clifford gates act as permutations on phase space points.
- Non-negative distributions exist for stabilizer states under Clifford gates.
- The formalism extends to qubits, capturing non-contextuality of Clifford gates.

## Abstract

We show that qubit stabilizer states can be represented by non-negative quasi-probability distributions associated with a Wigner-Weyl-Moyal formalism where Clifford gates are positive state-independent maps. This is accomplished by generalizing the Wigner-Weyl-Moyal formalism to three generators instead of two---producing an exterior, or Grassmann, algebra---which results in Clifford group gates for qubits that act as a permutation on the finite Weyl phase space points naturally associated with stabilizer states. As a result, a non-negative probability distribution can be associated with each stabilizer state's three-generator Wigner function, and these distributions evolve deterministically to one another under Clifford gates. This corresponds to a hidden variable theory that is non-contextual and local for qubit Clifford gates while Clifford (Pauli) measurements have a context-dependent representation. Equivalently, we show that qubit Clifford gates can be expressed as propagators within the three-generator Wigner-Weyl-Moyal formalism whose semiclassical expansion is truncated at order $\hbar^0$ with a finite number of terms. The $T$-gate, which extends the Clifford gate set to one capable of universal quantum computation, require a semiclassical expansion of the propagator to order $\hbar^1$. We compare this approach to previous quasi-probability descriptions of qubits that relied on the two-generator Wigner-Weyl-Moyal formalism and find that the two-generator Weyl symbols of stabilizer states result in a description of evolution under Clifford gates that is state-dependent, in contrast to the three-generator formalism. We have thus extended Wigner non-negative quasi-probability distributions from the odd $d$-dimensional case to $d=2$ qubits, which describe the non-contextuality of Clifford gates and contextuality of Pauli measurements on qubit stabilizer states.