  With the previous notions of bisimulation presented in literature, to check
if two quantum processes are bisimilar, we have to instantiate the free quantum
variables of them with arbitrary quantum states, and verify the bisimilarity of
resultant configurations. This makes checking bisimilarity infeasible from an
algorithmic point of view because quantum states constitute a continuum. In
this paper, we introduce a symbolic operational semantics for quantum processes
directly at the quantum operation level, which allows us to describe the
bisimulation between quantum processes without resorting to quantum states. We
show that the symbolic bisimulation defined here is equivalent to the open
bisimulation for quantum processes in the previous work, when strong
bisimulations are considered. An algorithm for checking symbolic ground
bisimilarity is presented. We also give a modal logical characterisation for
quantum bisimilarity based on an extension of Hennessy-Milner logic to quantum
processes.
