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arXiv:2001.04440 · New Journal of Physics

The quantum marginal problem for symmetric states: applications to variational optimization, nonlocality and self-testing

Albert Aloy, Matteo Fadel, Jordi Tura

Published Jan 29, 2021• 24 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we present a method to solve the quantum marginal problem for symmetric d -level systems. The method is built upon an efficient semi-definite program that uses the compatibility conditions of an m -body reduced density with a global n -body density matrix supported on the symmetric space. We illustrate the applicability of the method in central quantum information problems with several exemplary case studies. Namely, (i) a fast variational ansatz to optimize local Hamiltonians over symmetric states, (ii) a method to optimize symmetric, few-body Bell operators over symmetric states and (iii) a set of sufficient conditions to determine which symmetric states cannot be self-tested from few-body observables. As a by-product of our findings, we also provide a generic, analytical correspondence between arbitrary superpositions of n -qubit Dicke states and translationally-invariant diagonal matrix product states of bond dimension n .

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/abe15e

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Jianxin Chen, Zhengfeng Ji, Nengkun Yu +1 more

The quantum marginal problem asks whether a set of given density matrices are consistent, i.e., whether they can be the reduced density matrices of a global quantum state. Not many nontrivial analytic necessary (or sufficient) conditions are known for the problem in general. We propose a method to detect consistency of overlapping quantum marginals by considering the separability of some derived states. Our method works well for the $k$-symmetric extension problem in general and for the general overlapping marginal problems in some cases. Our work is, in some sense, the converse to the well-known $k$-symmetric extension criterion for separability.

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Abstract In this paper, we present a method to solve the quantum marginal problem for symmetric d -level systems. The method is built upon an efficient semi-definite program that uses the compatibility conditions of an m -body reduced density with a global n -body density matrix supported on the symmetric space. We illustrate the applicability of the method in central quantum information problems with several exemplary case studies. Namely, (i) a fast variational ansatz to optimize local Hamiltonians over symmetric states, (ii) a method to optimize symmetric, few-body Bell operators over symmetric states and (iii) a set of sufficient conditions to determine which symmetric states cannot be self-tested from few-body observables. As a by-product of our findings, we also provide a generic, analytical correspondence between arbitrary superpositions of n -qubit Dicke states and translationally-invariant diagonal matrix product states of bond dimension n .
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 nnn-qubit quantum states from all the (nk)\binom{n}{k}(kn​) marginal reductions to kkk 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≤125\leq n\leq125≤n≤12 and ⌊(n−1)/2⌋≤k≤n−1\lfloor(n-1)/\sqrt{2}\rfloor\leq k\leq n-1⌊(n−1)/2​⌋≤k≤n−1, where ⌊⋅⌋\lfloor\cdot\rfloor⌊⋅⌋ denotes the floor function.
We analyze entanglement and nonlocal properties of the convex set of symmetric NNN-qubit states which are diagonal in the Dicke basis. First, we demonstrate that within this set, semidefinite positivity of partial transposition (PPT) is necessary and sufficient for separability---which has also been reported recently by Yu [Phys. Rev. A 94, 060101(R) (2016)]. Furthermore, we show which states among the entangled diagonal symmetric are nonlocal under two-body Bell inequalities. The diagonal symmetric convex set contains a simple and extended family of states that violate the weak Peres conjecture, being PPT with respect to one partition but violating a Bell inequality in such partition. Our method opens directions to address entanglement and nonlocality on higher dimensional symmetric states, where presently very few results are available.
We introduce the resource marginal problems , which concern the possibility of having a resource-free target subsystem compatible with a g i v e n collection of marginal density matrices. By identifying an appropriate choice of resource R and target subsystem T, our problems reduce, respectively, to the well-known marginal problems for quantum states and the problem of determining if a given quantum system is a resource. More generally, we say that a set of marginal states is resource-free incompatible with a target subsystem T if all global states compatible with this set must result in a resourceful state in T of type R. We show that this incompatibility i n d u c e s a resource theory that can be quantified by a monotone and obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for this monotone to be computable as a conic program with finite optimum. We further show, via the corresponding witnesses, that (1) resource-free incompatibility is equivalent to an operational advantage in some channel-discrimination tasks, and (2) some specific cases of such tasks fully characterize the convertibility between marginal density matrices exhibiting resource-free incompatibility. Through our framework, one sees a clear connection between any marginal problem – which implicitly involves some notion of incompatibility – for quantum states and a resource theory for quantum states. We also establish a close connection between the physical relevance of resource marginal problems and the ground state properties of certain many-body Hamiltonians. In terms of application, the universality of our framework leads, for example, to a further quantitative understanding of the incompatibility associated with the recently-proposed entanglement marginal problems and entanglement transitivity problems.
We study local marginals in one-dimensional translation-invariant quantum systems that may hide finite-period structure. Given an nnn-site reduced density matrix, we ask whether it can be obtained by repeating a finite ppp-site block state along the chain and averaging over the ppp lattice translations. This defines a symmetrized block-product periodic marginal problem, which provides a route both to diagnosing hidden periodic order from local data and to upper bounding ground-state energy densities of infinite translation-invariant local Hamiltonians. We develop two complementary methods. The first is a semidefinite-programming relaxation based on block permutation symmetry and positive partial transpose constraints, which outer-approximates the convex hull of such marginals and yields certified infeasibility tests. The second is a symmetrized matrix product state ansatz, which constructs explicit block-product periodic states and gives variational upper bounds. We benchmark the framework on the Majumdar-Ghosh model, transverse-field Ising, XX, XXZ, and contextuality-related spin models. The results show that the method captures the expected finite-period structure in exactly solvable cases and gives systematically improving variational energies as the period and bond dimension increase. We also formulate a periodic-NPA relaxation for translation-invariant contextuality witnesses and recover the known quantum limits in the tested examples.
Abstract Quantum embedding theories are powerful tools for approximately solving large‐scale, strongly correlated quantum many‐body problems. The main idea of quantum embedding is to glue together a highly accurate quantum theory at the local scale and a less accurate quantum theory at the global scale. We introduce the first quantum embedding theory that is also variational, in that it is guaranteed to provide a one‐sided bound for the exact ground‐state energy. Our method, which we call the variational embedding method, provides a lower bound for this quantity. The method relaxes the representability conditions for quantum marginals to a set of linear and semidefinite constraints that operate at both local and global scales, resulting in a semidefinite program (SDP) to be solved numerically. The accuracy of the method can be systematically improved. The method is versatile and can be applied, in particular, to quantum many‐body problems for both quantum spin systems and fermionic systems, such as those arising from electronic structure calculations. We describe how the proper notion of quantum marginal, sufficiently general to accommodate both of these settings, should be phrased in terms of certain algebras of operators. We also investigate the duality theory for our SDPs, which offers valuable perspective on our method as an embedding theory. As a byproduct of this investigation, we describe a formulation for efficiently implementing the variational embedding method via a partial dualization procedure and the solution of quantum analogues of the Kantorovich problem from optimal transport theory. © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC.
The quantum marginal problem asks whether a set of given density matrices are consistent, i.e., whether they can be the reduced density matrices of a global quantum state. Not many nontrivial analytic necessary (or sufficient) conditions are known for the problem in general. We propose a method to detect consistency of overlapping quantum marginals by considering the separability of some derived states. Our method works well for the kkk-symmetric extension problem in general and for the general overlapping marginal problems in some cases. Our work is, in some sense, the converse to the well-known kkk-symmetric extension criterion for separability.