Infrared Safety from ZX-Diagrams: A Categorical Proof of Soft-QED as Open Quantum System

Abstract

The discard ZX-calculus, a diagrammatic language for mixed-state quantum mechanics, is used to give a nonperturbative, categorical proof of the Bloch-Nordsieck cancellation of infrared divergences in QED. Soft photons are treated as an open quantum system: the resolved charged particles and hard photons form the system, while photons below a detector resolution form the environment. The reduced hard channel is a completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) map, and the soft-photon theorem replaces the full S-matrix by a controlled displacement operator whose Feynman-Vernon influence functional satisfies the equal-history normalization ${\cal F}[J,J]=1 $. In the ZX-calculus, this normalization is a single diagrammatic identity: the doubled displacement diagram collapses to the bare wire under the unitarity, cyclicity, and discard rules. The proof therefore serves as a categorical consistency check on the open-system treatment of soft QED given in a companion paper; it confirms that the physical derivation is logically complete and free of hidden assumptions about the infrared limit. For off-diagonal hard-state elements, the same diagram yields the coherent-state overlap, giving a first-principles account of soft-cloud decoherence. The soft-shell coarse graining is then constructed as a CPTP Schur channel whose infinitesimal limit produces the exact Lindblad generator with jump operators determined by the eikonal emission amplitudes. Finally, a local CPTP-certification pipeline is developed for non-Markovian process tensors, enabling constant-time verification of trace preservation in open quantum simulations. The framework bridges categorical quantum semantics, non-equilibrium field theory, and practical open-system compilation.