The anticommutation of Fermionic fields raises the problem of simulating the evolution of Fermionic systems by means of commuting quantum systems, say qubits. We tackle [1,2] the issue of retaining locality of Fermionic operations considering local Fermionic modes as the elementary systems of an operational probabilistic theory. The locality of Fermionic operations, namely operations on systems that are not causally connected must commute, implies the parity superselection rule that inhibits the superposition of states with an even and an odd number of excitations. As a result the Fermionic theory lacks two distinctive traits of quantum theory, the local tomography and the monogamy of the entanglement.
The anticommutation of Fermionic fields raises the problem of simulating the evolution of Fermionic systems by means of commuting quantum systems, say qubits. We tackle [1,2] the issue of retaining locality of Fermionic operations considering local Fermionic modes as the elementary systems of an operational probabilistic theory. The locality of Fermionic operations, namely operations on systems that are not causally connected must commute, implies the parity superselection rule that inhibits the superposition of states with an even and an odd number of excitations. As a result the Fermionic theory lacks two distinctive traits of quantum theory, the local tomography and the monogamy of the entanglement.
The anticommutation of Fermionic fields raises the problem of simulating the evolution of Fermionic systems by means of commuting quantum systems, say qubits. We tackle the issue considering local Fermionic modes as the elementary systems of an operational probabilistic theory. We show that the locality of Fermionic operations, namely operations on systems that are not causally connected must commute, implies the parity superselection rule, which inhibits the superposition of states with an even and an odd number of excitations. Accordingly we derive the largest probabilistic theory compatible with the parity superselection constraint and show that it lacks two distinctive traits of quantum theory, the local tomography and the monogamy of the entanglement. We generalize the notion of superselection rule to general probabilistic theories as sets of linear constraints on the convex set of states and prove a trade-off between the cardinality of the superselection rule and the degree of holism of the resulting theory. Within this scenario the Fermionic quantum theory and the real quantum theory can be regarded as superselected versions of the usual quantum theory. These results are published in Ref. [7] http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/107/2/20009 and Ref. [8] http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217751X14300257. In the last three decades the relation between Fermionic systems and other quantum systems has been throughly investigated from both the computational and the physical point of view. In particular the puzzling anti-commuting nature of the Fermionic systems casts a shadow on the possibility of simulating the physical evolution of a bunch of Fermionic systems by means of commuting quantum systems—say qubits. This issue was raised by R. P. Feynman in 1982 [9], when in his seminal work on physical computation he wondered about the possibility of simulating Fermions by local quantum systems in interaction—what we would call nowadays a quantum computer. The problem is that of encoding the evolution of Fermionic fields onto localized quantum systems. A well-known encoding of N Fermionic systems into N qubits is given by the Jordan-Wigner transform (JWT) [14]. Such an encoding, based on the identification between the Fock space of N Fermions and the Hilbert space of N qubits, provides a -algebra isomorphism between the Fermionic anticommuting algebra and the commuting algebra of qubits. Such a correspondence has been a valuable instrument in modern solid state physics for solving the one dimensional XY spin-chains [18, 15] and then for the understanding of superconductivity and the quantum Hall effect. Moreover, a time-adaptive JWT has been introduced in Ref. [19], which allows to contract Fermionic unitary circuits with the same complexity as for the corresponding spin model. In quantum information science the JWT has been used to extend to the Fermionic case notions as entanglement [1], the entropic area law [24], and universal computation [5]. More recently the JWT, which originally regards one dimensional chains of spin-1=2 systems, has been generalized to any spin [3] and lattice [13] dimension. Despite its computational power, the JWT fails to solve completely the issue established by Feynman: physically local Fermionic operations are mapped into nonlocal quantum ones and viceversa. As noticed by many authors this can lead to ambiguities in defining the partial trace [16, 4, 17, 10], and in assessing
The characterization of entanglement is a fundamental issue for Quantum Information Theory. But the definition of entanglement depends on the notion of locality, and thus on the tensor product structure of the state space of the composite system. This notion is affected by the presence of superselection rules that restrict the accessible Hilbert space to a direct sum of subspaces. Indistinguishability of particles imposes one such restriction, namely to totally symmetric or totally antisymmetric states. The entanglement can in this case be defined with respect to partitions of modes in the second quantization formalism. For fermionic systems the Fock space of m modes is isomorphic to the space of m qubits, but the action of creation and annihilation operators is not local, due to their anticommutation. Conservation of the parity of fermion number imposes another relevant superselection rule. It requires that local physical observables commute with the local parity operator. Taking into account the considerations above, it is possible to define the set of separable states or equivalently the concept of entanglement for fermionic systems in a number of ways. Here we analyze systematically these possibilities and the relation among the various sets of separable states. We also discuss the behavior of the different classes when taking several copies of the state, as well as the characterization of the sets in terms of the usual criteria regarding the tensor product.
We show that the computational model based on local fermionic modes in place of qubits does not satisfy local tomography and monogamy of entanglement, and has mixed states with maximal entanglement of formation. These features directly follow from the parity superselection rule. We generalize quantum superselection rules to general probabilistic theories as sets of linear constraints on the convex set of states. We then provide a link between the cardinality of the superselection rule and the degree of holism of the resulting theory.
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.
Abstract The operator algebra of fermionic modes is isomorphic to that of qubits, the difference between them is twofold: the embedding of subalgebras corresponding to mode subsets and multiqubit subsystems on the one hand, and the parity superselection in the fermionic case on the other. We discuss these two fundamental differences extensively, and illustrate these through the Jordan–Wigner representation in a coherent, self-contained, pedagogical way, from the point of view of quantum information theory. Our perspective leads us to develop useful new tools for the treatment of fermionic systems, such as the fermionic (quasi-)tensor product, fermionic canonical embedding, fermionic partial trace, fermionic products of maps and fermionic embeddings of maps. We formulate these by direct, easily applicable formulas, without mode permutations, for arbitrary partitionings of the modes. It is also shown that fermionic reduced states can be calculated by the fermionic partial trace, containing the proper phase factors. We also consider variants of the notions of fermionic mode correlation and entanglement, which can be endowed with the usual, local operation based motivation, if the parity superselection rule is imposed. We also elucidate some other fundamental points, related to joint map extensions, which make the parity superselection inevitable in the description of fermionic systems.
A reasonable quantum information theory for fermions must respect the parity superselection rule to comply with the special theory of relativity and the no-signaling principle. This rule restricts the possibility of any quantum state to have a superposition between even- and odd-parity fermionic states. thereby characterizing the set of physically allowed fermionic quantum states. Here we introduce the physically allowed quantum operations, in congruence with the parity superselection rule, that map the set of allowed fermionic states onto itself. We first introduce unitary and projective measurement operations of the fermionic states. We further extend the formalism to general quantum operations in the forms of Stinespring dilation, operator-sum representation, and axiomatic completely positive and trace-preserving maps. We explicitly show the equivalence between these three representations of fermionic quantum operations. We discuss the possible implications of our results in characterization of correlations in fermionic systems.