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arXiv:2608.07047

Stationarity is not enough: tightness of the quantum mechanical bootstrap and the copositive cone

Daniel Keren

Published Aug 7, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

The numerical bootstrap for quantum mechanics tests a candidate state's positivity only against sums of squares, whereas every physical state assigns nonnegative expectation to every pointwise nonnegative polynomial. In one dimension the two coincide; in two or more they do not. Whether this gap is realized depends sharply on which constraint set is imposed. For the stationary bootstrap, which imposes <[H,O]> = 0 and is the relaxation appropriate to thermal and mixed states, we exhibit a two-dimensional quartic double well and a moment vector that satisfies every level-three stationary constraint exactly, has a positive definite moment matrix, and yet assigns a negative expectation to a polynomial nonnegative on R^2; it is therefore the moment sequence of no state. All data are rational, and every step is verified in exact arithmetic. For the eigenstate bootstrap, which additionally imposes = E, the same search finds no violation in any of five settings spanning two, three and five degrees of freedom and truncation levels three and four, tested against complete families of separating polynomials. The single exception occurs at a truncation so low that only one eigenstate constraint survives, and the theory presented here accounts for it. We identify the mechanism: the eigenstate constraints bound the high momentum moments, otherwise unbounded on the feasible set, and it is those unbounded directions that reach the region between the two cones. Finally, under the reflection symmetries of a typical potential the relevant obstruction is copositivity rather than nonnegativity, which, for the quartic witnesses available at the lowest truncation, places the first possible failure at five degrees of freedom. We conjecture that the eigenstate constraints imply an Archimedean-type bound on the momentum moments, and formulate the corresponding tightness statement.

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2608.07047

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The numerical bootstrap for quantum mechanics tests a candidate state's positivity only against sums of squares, whereas every physical state assigns nonnegative expectation to every pointwise nonnegative polynomial. In one dimension the two coincide; in two or more they do not. Whether this gap is realized depends sharply on which constraint set is imposed. For the stationary bootstrap, which imposes <[H,O]> = 0 and is the relaxation appropriate to thermal and mixed states, we exhibit a two-dimensional quartic double well and a moment vector that satisfies every level-three stationary constraint exactly, has a positive definite moment matrix, and yet assigns a negative expectation to a polynomial nonnegative on R^2; it is therefore the moment sequence of no state. All data are rational, and every step is verified in exact arithmetic. For the eigenstate bootstrap, which additionally imposes = E, the same search finds no violation in any of five settings spanning two, three and five degrees of freedom and truncation levels three and four, tested against complete families of separating polynomials. The single exception occurs at a truncation so low that only one eigenstate constraint survives, and the theory presented here accounts for it. We identify the mechanism: the eigenstate constraints bound the high momentum moments, otherwise unbounded on the feasible set, and it is those unbounded directions that reach the region between the two cones. Finally, under the reflection symmetries of a typical potential the relevant obstruction is copositivity rather than nonnegativity, which, for the quartic witnesses available at the lowest truncation, places the first possible failure at five degrees of freedom. We conjecture that the eigenstate constraints imply an Archimedean-type bound on the momentum moments, and formulate the corresponding tightness statement.

For the coupled three-dimensional double well

H=\tfrac12|p|^2+2\sum_i(q_i^2-1)^2-\sum_{i<j}q_i^2q_j^2

we exhibit, at the first excited energy level (and also at the ground state), a linear functional on polynomials of degree

\le 6

that satisfies every constraint of the standard level-3 eigenstate bootstrap, has a \emph{strictly} positive definite moment matrix, and nevertheless assigns a negative value to a nonnegative polynomial. It is therefore an interior point of the level-3 relaxation that is realized by no quantum state. The construction reflects a fact that holds at every level: the eigenstate rows never reach the top-degree momentum moments. At level 3, where strictly feasible points exist, this means that the corresponding block of the moment matrix carries no information about which energies admit one. Every algebraic ingredient is an exact rational certificate, and the only numerical ingredients (spectral enclosures of an eigenfunction) are carried out in rigorous ball arithmetic.

The eigenstate quantum-mechanical bootstrap can converge to the physical moment set while remaining nonexact at every finite order. We prove this for a one-dimensional quasi-exactly solvable sextic oscillator at explicitly known eigenvalues, including excited levels. At every finite order, the lower and upper bounds on

u^2

remain strictly below and above its physical value, even after adjoining arbitrary finite polynomial Gram tests and all eigenstate-annihilator relations visible in the retained moment space. Hence neither side of the centered observable admits a finite sum-of-squares certificate modulo the eigenstate annihilator. The gap persists under any finite set of additional localizing constraints whose weights are strictly positive on polynomial vectors. We then prove convergence for polynomial Schrödinger operators satisfying explicit sum-of-squares confinement and derivative bounds. The eigenstate relations give moment estimates uniform in the truncation order; these yield a regular Schrödinger representation supported on the prescribed eigenspace. Finally, a four-mode extension combines this fixed-observable obstruction with feasible position moments having no positive representing measure at every finite order. At level three, this construction yields nonphysical feasible points with strictly positive definite moment matrices.

Although the quantum state of a many-body system (e.g, a system consisting of several atoms) is described in terms of its degrees of freedom, i.e., a large number of variables representing a point on the compact space of quantum states, there is usually a small number of parameters that can be actually measured experimentally. We show that the problem of deciding whether the underlying quantum state is entangled is equivalent to the problem of deciding whether the set of measured parameters are the moments of some measure defined over the compact space of states of the many-body system. By considering quantum entanglement of n identical atoms we arrive at the truncated moment problem defined for symmetric measures over a product of n copies of unit balls in R^d. We consider moments up to degree 2 since these are most readily available experimentally. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to the moment cone, which can be expressed via a linear matrix inequality (LMI) of size at most 2d+2, which is independent of n. We can convert the LMIs into a set of explicit semialgebraic inequalities giving necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the moment cone, and show that the two conditions approach each other in the limit of large n. The inequalities are derived via considering the dual cone of nonnegative polynomials, and its sum-of-squares (SOS) relaxation. We show that the SOS relaxation of the dual cone is asymptotically exact, and using symmetry reduction techniques (J. Pure Appl. Algebra 192, no. 1-3, 95, arXiv:1205.3102), it can be written as a small linear matrix inequality of size at most 2d+2, which is independent of n. For the cone of nonnegative polynomials we also prove an analogue of the half degree principle for globally nonnegative symmetric polynomials (J. Math. Anal. Appl. 284, no. 1, 174, J. Pure Appl. Algebra 216, no. 4, 850).

We establish exact thresholds for the failure of simultaneous quantum typicality: three parties for mixed states and four for pure states. For the four-qubit Higuchi--Sudbery state, every sequence satisfying the expected purity bounds on three overlapping marginals, with sufficiently small fixed positive entropy slack, is asymptotically perfectly distinguishable from the tensor powers of the input: its trace distance from them tends to the maximum value

2

. This maximal separation persists, with a common positive slack, throughout an open neighborhood in the full four-qubit state space. Tracing out one party yields a mixed tripartite example. The proof connects simultaneous quantum smoothing with polynomial concentration on $\CP^1$. Symmetry reduces the problem to a frame inequality on $\Sym^n(\mathbb C^2)$, where a linear entropy deficit competes with a quadratic cost of polynomial concentration. Bernstein--Markov estimates and a subharmonic barrier control this cost, yielding an exponential obstruction to simultaneous typicality. These results disprove Dutil's multiparty quantum typicality conjecture, formulated in 2011, and the one-shot simultaneous min-entropy-smoothing conjectures of Drescher--Fawzi and Colomer--Winter. Together with the positive results for smaller systems, they determine the smallest numbers of parties at which simultaneous typicality can fail.

We present a semidefinite programming algorithm to find eigenvalues of Schrödinger operators within the bootstrap approach to quantum mechanics. The bootstrap approach involves two ingredients: a nonlinear set of constraints on the variables (expectation values of operators in an energy eigenstate), plus positivity constraints (unitarity) that need to be satisfied. By fixing the energy we linearize all the constraints and show that the feasibility problem can be presented as an optimization problem for the variables that are not fixed by the constraints and one additional slack variable that measures the failure of positivity. To illustrate the method we are able to obtain high-precision, sharp bounds on eigenenergies for arbitrary confining polynomial potentials in one dimension.

We develop a bootstrap approach to Euclidean two-point correlators, in the thermal or ground state of quantum mechanical systems. We formulate the problem of bounding the two-point correlator as a semidefinite programming problem, subject to the constraints of reflection positivity, the Heisenberg equations of motion, and the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger condition or ground-state positivity. In the dual formulation, the Heisenberg equations of motion become "inequalities of motion" on the Lagrange multipliers that enforce the constraints. This enables us to derive rigorous bounds on continuous-time two-point correlators using a finite-dimensional semidefinite or polynomial matrix program. We illustrate this method by bootstrapping the two-point correlators of the ungauged one-matrix quantum mechanics, from which we extract the spectrum and matrix elements of the low-lying adjoint states. Along the way, we provide a new derivation of the energy-entropy balance inequality and establish a connection between the high-temperature two-point correlator bootstrap and the matrix integral bootstrap.