Grand Unification of All Discrete Wigner Functions on $d \times d$ Phase Space

Abstract

Wigner functions help visualise quantum states and dynamics while supporting quantitative analysis in quantum information. In the discrete setting, many inequivalent constructions coexist for each Hilbert-space dimension. This fragmentation obscures which features are fundamental and which are artefacts of representation. We introduce a stencil-based framework that exhausts all possible $d\times d$ discrete Wigner functions for a single $d$-dimensional quantum system (including a novel one for even $d$), subsuming known forms. We also give explicit invertible linear maps between definitions within the same $d$, enabling direct comparison of operational properties and exposing representation dependence.