English

Commuting operations factorise

Quantum Physics 2023-08-14 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Consider two agents, Alice and Bob, each of whom takes a quantum input, operates on a shared quantum system KK, and produces a quantum output. Alice and Bob's operations may commute, in the sense that the joint input-output behaviour is independent of the order in which they access KK. Here we ask whether this commutation property implies that KK can be split into two factors on which Alice and Bob act separately. The question can be regarded as a "fully quantum" generalisation of a problem posed by Tsirelson, who considered the case where Alice and Bob's inputs and outputs are classical. In this case, the answer is negative in general, but it is known that a factorisation exists in finite dimensions. Here we show the same holds in the fully quantum case, i.e., commuting operations factorise, provided that all input systems are finite-dimensional.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.05792,
  title  = {Commuting operations factorise},
  author = {Renato Renner and Ramona Wolf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.05792},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

24 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:53:08.973Z