Overlap and distinguishability of quantum states

Matthew Leifer

The status of the quantum state is perhaps the most controversial issue in the foundations of quantum theory. Is it an epistemic state (state of knowledge) or an ontic state (state of reality)? In realist models of quantum theory, the epistemic view asserts that nonorthogonal quantum states correspond to overlapping probability measures over the true ontic states. This naturally accounts for a large number of otherwise puzzling quantum phenomena. For example, the indistinguishability of nonorthogonal states is explained by the fact that the ontic state sometimes lies in the overlap region, in which case there is nothing in reality that could distinguish the two states. For this to work, the amount of overlap of the probability measures should be comparable to the indistinguishability of the quantum states. In this Letter, I exhibit a family of states for which the ratio of these two quantities must be ≤2de-cd in Hilbert spaces of dimension d that are divisible by 4. This implies that, for large Hilbert space dimension, the epistemic explanation of indistinguishability becomes implausible at an exponential rate as the Hilbert space dimension increases.

Pawela, Karol yczkowski

Matheus Eiji Ohno Bezerra, Valery Shchesnovich

Photon distinguishability is a fundamental property manifested in multiphoton interference and one of the main sources of noise in any photonic quantum information processing. In this work, rather than relying on first-quantization methods, we build on a generating-function framework based on the phase-space formalism to characterize the effects of partial distinguishability on the interference of single-mode squeezed states. Our approach goes beyond commonly used models that represent distinguishability via additional noninterfering modes and captures genuine multiphoton interference effects induced by the overlap of the internal state of the photons. This description provides a clear physical account of how distinguishability gives rise to effective noise in Gaussian boson sampling protocols while enabling a systematic investigation of phase effects arising from the overlap of the internal states.

William K. Wootters

Gary E. Bowman

Tomoyuki Morimae

We show that the Quantum State Distinguishability (QSD), which is a QSZK-complete problem, and the Quantum Circuit Distinguishability (QCD), which is a QIP-complete problem, can be solved by the verifier who can perform only single-qubit measurements. To show these results, we use measurement-based quantum computing: the honest prover sends a graph state to the verifier, and the verifier can perform universal quantum computing on it with only single-qubit measurements. If the prover is malicious, he does not necessarily generate the correct graph state, but the verifier can verify the correctness of the graph state by measuring the stabilizer operators.