Tomographic locality is a principle commonly used in the program of finding axioms that pick out quantum theory within the landscape of possible theories. The principle asserts the sufficiency of local measurements for achieving a tomographic characterization of any bipartite state. In this work, we explore the meaning of the principle of tomographic locality by developing a simple scheme for generating a wide variety of theories that violate the principle. In this scheme, one starts with a tomographically local theory -- which can be classical, quantum or post-quantum -- and a physical symmetry, and one restricts the processes in the theory to all and only those that are covariant with respect to the collective action of that symmetry. We refer to the resulting theories as twirled worlds. We show that failures of tomographic locality are ubiquitous in twirled worlds. From the possibility of such failures in classical twirled worlds, we argue that the failure of tomographic locality (i.e., tomographic nonlocality) does not imply ontological holism. Our results also demonstrate the need for researchers seeking to axiomatize quantum theory to take a stand on the question of whether there are superselection rules that have a fundamental status.
Tomographic locality is a principle commonly used in the program of finding axioms that pick out quantum theory within the landscape of possible theories. The principle asserts the sufficiency of local measurements for achieving a tomographic characterization of any bipartite state. In this work, we explore the meaning of the principle of tomographic locality by developing a simple scheme for generating a wide variety of theories that violate the principle. In this scheme, one starts with a tomographically local theory -- which can be classical, quantum or post-quantum -- and a physical symmetry, and one restricts the processes in the theory to all and only those that are covariant with respect to the collective action of that symmetry. We refer to the resulting theories as twirled worlds. We show that failures of tomographic locality are ubiquitous in twirled worlds. From the possibility of such failures in classical twirled worlds, we argue that the failure of tomographic locality (i.e., tomographic nonlocality) does not imply ontological holism. Our results also demonstrate the need for researchers seeking to axiomatize quantum theory to take a stand on the question of whether there are superselection rules that have a fundamental status.
Entanglement is a central and subtle feature of quantum theory, whose structure and operational behavior can change dramatically when additional physical constraints, such as symmetries or superselection rules, are imposed. Such constraints can give rise to striking and counter-intuitive phenomena, including local broadcasting of entangled states and failures of entanglement monogamy. These effects naturally arise in tomographically nonlocal theories (like real quantum theory, twirled worlds, or fermionic quantum theory), where composite systems possess holistic degrees of freedom that are inaccessible to local measurements. In this work, we study entanglement in such theories within the framework of generalized probabilistic theories. We show that the failure of tomographic locality leads to two qualitatively distinct forms of entanglement, which we term tomographically-local entanglement and tomographically-nonlocal entanglement. We analyze the operational consequences of this distinction, proving that tomographically-nonlocal entanglement is useless for Bell nonlocality, steering, and teleportation, but sufficient for dense coding and perfectly secure data hiding. This framework clarifies the origin of several previously puzzling features of entanglement that arise when tomographic locality fails, as can happen even in quantum theory when one considers fermions or fundamental superselection rules.
Twirled and swirled worlds describe generalised probabilistic theories (GPTs) restricted by symmetry-imposed superselection rules. We extend these constructions to a fully compositional setting for finite-dimensional GPTs and compact groups, treating states, effects, and multipartite transformations uniformly as processes. We distinguish system actions from process-space actions. We define actions on a theory as a whole by requiring the corresponding process-space actions to respect sequential and parallel composition. Averaging physical theory actions defines twirling, while averaging nonphysical theory actions defines swirling. We show that invariant subtheories might not satisfy process tomography, and establish conditions under which they do, involving invariant dynamically faithful states or internal classical reference frames. For locally tomographic parent theories, we prove that every theory symmetry admits a representation by linear system actions and that the invariant subtheory satisfies process tomography. An invariant multipartite process space fails local tomography if and only if some bipartition has sides sharing a non-trivial irreducible representation. We characterise when ancillary systems are necessary, which representations they must carry, and when entanglement is required for ancilla-free process tomography. We develop a framework for unifying twirled subtheories and extend incoherent simulations to compact groups. Finally, we recover bilocal classical theory as a twirled subtheory of classical theory and real quantum theory as a swirled subtheory of complex quantum theory, deriving their tomographic properties from their representation structure.
The principle of tomographic locality states that the operational state of a multipartite system can be fully characterized by the statistics obtained from measurements that are local to the individual subsystems. This property holds in quantum theory and features prominently in axiomatic reconstructions of the theory, where it serves to rule out a wide class of alternatives. For instance, quantum theory with Hilbert spaces defined over the real field (rather than the complex field) is an example of a theory that is ruled out in this fashion. Given its foundational importance, it is worthwhile to subject this principle to a direct experimental test. Specifically, we consider an experiment on the polarization degrees of freedom of a pair of photonic modes in a prepare-and-measure scenario and analyze the resulting data within the framework of generalized probabilistic theories. The signature of a failure of tomographic locality is that there are pairs of states on the bipartite system that can only be distinguished by the statistics they yield for non-separable measurements. In the full quantum setting, we find no evidence of a violation of tomographic locality. As a test of our analysis method, we also verify that if we restrict attention to those states and measurements that lie within the fragment described by quantum theory over the real field, then a clear signature of the failure of tomographic locality is observed.
Recent work by Renou et al. (2021) has led to some controversy concerning the question of whether quantum theory requires complex numbers for its formulation. We promote the view that the main result of that work is best understood not as a claim about the relative merits of different representations of quantum theory, but rather as a claim about the possibility of experimentally adjudicating between standard quantum theory and an alternative theory -- a foil theory -- known as real-amplitude quantum theory (RQT). In particular, the claim is that this adjudication can be achieved given only an assumption about the causal structure of the experiment. Here, we aim to shed some light on why this is possible, by reconceptualizing the comparison of the two theories as an instance of a broader class of such theory comparisons. By recasting RQT as the subtheory of quantum theory that arises by symmetrizing with respect to the collective action of a time-reversal symmetry, we can compare it to other subtheories that arise by symmetrization, but for different symmetries. If the symmetry has a unitary representation, the resulting foil theory is termed a twirled quantum world, and if it does not (as is the case in RQT), the resulting foil theory is termed a swirled quantum world. We show that, in contrast to RQT, there is no possibility of distinguishing any twirled quantum world from quantum theory given only an assumption about causal structure. We also define analogues of twirling and swirling for an arbitrary generalized probabilistic theory and identify certain necessary conditions on a causal structure for it to be able to support a causal compatibility gap between the theory and its symmetrized version. We draw out the implications of these analyses for the question of how a lack of a shared reference frame state features into the possibility of such a gap.
Process tomography, the experimental characterization of physical processes, is a central task in science and engineering. Here, we investigate the axiomatic requirements that guarantee the in-principle feasibility of process tomography in general physical theories. Specifically, we explore the requirement that process tomography should be achievable with a finite number of auxiliary systems and with a finite number of input states. We show that this requirement is satisfied in every theory equipped with universal extensions, that is, correlated states from which all other correlations can be generated locally with non-zero probability. We show that universal extensions are guaranteed to exist in two cases: (1) theories permitting conclusive state teleportation, and (2) theories satisfying three properties of Causality, Pure Product States, and Purification. In case (2), the existence of universal extensions follows from a symmetry property of Purification, whereby all pure bipartite states with the same marginal on one system are locally interconvertible. Crucially, our results hold even in theories that do not satisfy Local Tomography, the property that the state of any composite system can be identified from the correlations of local measurements. Summarizing, the existence of universal extensions, without any additional requirement of Local Tomography, is a sufficient guarantee for the characterizability of physical processes using a finite number of auxiliary systems and with a finite number of input systems.
It is commonly believed that failures of tomographic completeness undermine assessments of nonclassicality in noncontextuality experiments. In this work, we study how such failures can indeed lead to mistaken assessments of nonclassicality. We then show that proofs of the failure of noncontextuality are robust to a very broad class of failures of tomographic completeness, including the kinds of failures that are likely to occur in real experiments. We do so by showing that such proofs actually rely on a much weaker assumption that we term relative tomographic completeness : namely, that one's experimental procedures are tomographic for each other . Thus, the failure of noncontextuality can be established even with coarse-grained, effective, emergent, or virtual degrees of freedom. This also implies that the existence of a deeper theory of nature (beyond that being probed in one's experiment) does not in and of itself pose any challenge to proofs of nonclassicality. To prove these results, we first introduce a number of useful new concepts within the framework of generalized probabilistic theories (GPTs). Most notably, we introduce the notion of a GPT s u b s y s t e m , generalizing a range of preexisting notions of subsystems (including those arising from tensor products, direct sums, decoherence processes, virtual encodings, and more). We also introduce the notion of a s h a d o w of a GPT fragment, which captures the information lost when one's states and effects are unknowingly not tomographic for one another.