We introduce a class of so called Markovian marginals, which gives a natural framework for constructing solutions to the quantum marginal problem. We consider a set of marginals that possess a certain internal quantum Markov chain structure. If they are equipped with such a structure and are locally consistent on their overlapping supports, there exists a global state that is consistent with all the marginals. The proof is constructive, and relies on a reduction of the marginal problem to a certain combinatorial problem. By employing an entanglement entropy scaling law, we give a physical argument that the requisite structure exists in any states with finite correlation lengths. This includes topologically ordered states as well as finite temperature Gibbs states.
We introduce a class of so called Markovian marginals, which gives a natural framework for constructing solutions to the quantum marginal problem. We consider a set of marginals that possess a certain internal quantum Markov chain structure. If they are equipped with such a structure and are locally consistent on their overlapping supports, there exists a global state that is consistent with all the marginals. The proof is constructive, and relies on a reduction of the marginal problem to a certain combinatorial problem. By employing an entanglement entropy scaling law, we give a physical argument that the requisite structure exists in any states with finite correlation lengths. This includes topologically ordered states as well as finite temperature Gibbs states.
Quantum many-body states that frequently appear in physics often obey an entropy scaling law, meaning that an entanglement entropy of a subsystem can be expressed as a sum of terms that scale linearly with its volume and area, plus a correction term that is independent of its size.We conjecture that these states have an efficient dual description in terms of a set of marginal density matrices on bounded regions, obeying the same entropy scaling law locally.We prove a restricted version of this conjecture for translationally invariant systems in two spatial dimensions.Specifically, we prove that a translationally invariant marginal obeying three nonlinear constraints-all of which follow from the entropy scaling law straightforwardlymust be consistent with some global state on an infinite lattice.Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for the maximum-entropy density compatible with those marginals, deriving a variational upper bound on the thermodynamic free energy.The main assumptions of our construction are satisfied exactly by solvable models of topological order and approximately by finite-temperature Gibbs states of certain quantum spin Hamiltonians.
We study when local reduced density operators, viewed as quantum marginals, can be assembled into a global quantum state with a prescribed Markov structure. The starting point is a canonical logarithmic construction T(R), the noncommutative analogue of the junction-tree formula for decomposable graphical models. Unlike in the classical case, this formal construction may fail: noncommutativity can prevent it from being a normalized state with the prescribed marginals. We prove that this obstruction is captured exactly by a trace condition. For two overlapping marginals, and for clique marginals on a chordal graph, the condition Tr(T(R))=1 is equivalent to the existence of a quantum Markov completion. When it exists, the completion is unique, equal to T(R), and selected by the maximum entropy principle. In the two-clique case, we also give an equivalent conditional reconstruction characterization: the two natural one-sided sandwich reconstructions agree if and only if the trace condition holds. We introduce the global quantum information gI(G)ρ associated with a chordal graph G and show that it is a relative-entropy discrepancy from ρ to the logarithmic candidate, with a trace correction when the candidate is not normalized. We also prove an intersection property for strictly positive quantum conditional independence. Three-qubit Pauli examples illustrate how the quantum obstructions are real: local consistency, feasibility, Markov feasibility, and maximum entropy can all separate.
Recently, we introduced a solution to the quantum marginal problem relevant to two-dimensional quantum many-body systems [I. H. Kim, Phys. Rev. X, 11, 021039]. One of the conditions was that the marginals are internally translationally invariant. We show that this condition can be replaced by a weaker condition, namely the local consistency of the marginals. This extends the applicability of the solution to any quantum many-body states in two dimensions that satisfy the entropy scaling law, with or without symmetry. We also significantly simplify the proof by advocating the usage of the maximum-entropy principle.
The physics of a many-particle system is determined by the correlations in its quantum state. Therefore, analyzing these correlations is the foremost task of many-body physics. Any 'a priori' constraint for the properties of the global vs. the local states-the so-called marginals-would help in order to narrow down the wealth of possible solutions for a given many-body problem, however, little is known about such constraints. We derive an equality for correlation-related quantities of any multipartite quantum system composed of finite-dimensional local parties. This relation defines a necessary condition for the compatibility of the marginal properties with those of the joint state. While the equality holds both for pure and mixed states, the pure-state version containing only entanglement measures represents a fully general monogamy relation for entanglement. These findings have interesting implications in terms of conservation laws for correlations, and also with respect to topology.
The quantum marginal problem consists in deciding whether a given set of marginal reductions is compatible with the existence of a global quantum state or not. In this work, we formulate the problem from the perspective of dynamical systems theory and study its advantages with respect to the standard approach. The introduced formalism allows us to analytically determine global quantum states from a wide class of self-consistent marginal reductions in any multipartite scenario. In particular, we show that any self-consistent set of multipartite marginal reductions is compatible with the existence of a global quantum state, after passing through a depolarizing channel. This result reveals that the complexity associated to the marginal problem can be drastically reduced when restricting the attention to sufficiently mixed marginals. We also formulate the marginal problem in a compressed way, in the sense that the total number of scalar constraints is smaller than the one required by the standard approach. This fact suggests an exponential speedup in runtime when considering semi-definite programming techniques to solve it, in both classical and quantum algorithms. Finally, we reconstruct n-qubit quantum states from all the (kn) marginal reductions to k parties, generated from randomly chosen mixed states. Numerical simulations reveal that the fraction of cases where we can find a global state equals 1 when 5≤n≤12 and ⌊(n−1)/2⌋≤k≤n−1, where ⌊⋅⌋ denotes the floor function.
The physics of a many-particle system is determined by the correlations in its quantum state. Therefore, analyzing these correlations is the foremost task of many-body physics. Any 'a priori' constraint for the properties of the global vs. the local states-the so-called marginals-would help in order to narrow down the wealth of possible solutions for a given many-body problem, however, little is known about such constraints. We derive an equality for correlation-related quantities of any multipartite quantum system composed of finite-dimensional local parties. This relation defines a necessary condition for the compatibility of the marginal properties with those of the joint state. While the equality holds both for pure and mixed states, the pure-state version containing only entanglement measures represents a fully general monogamy relation for entanglement. These findings have interesting implications in terms of conservation laws for correlations, and also with respect to topology.