English

Complexity in algebraic QFT

Quantum Physics 2025-08-22 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP Operator Algebras

Abstract

We consider a notion of complexity of quantum channels in relativistic continuum quantum field theory (QFT) defined by the distance to the trivial (identity) channel. Our distance measure is based on a specific divergence between quantum channels derived from the Belavkin-Staszewski (BS) divergence. We prove in the prerequisite generality necessary for the algebras in QFT that the corresponding complexity has several reasonable properties: (i) the complexity of a composite channel is not larger than the sum of its parts, (ii) it is additive for channels localized in spacelike separated regions, (iii) it is convex, (iv) for an NN-ary measurement channel it is logN\log N, (v) for a conditional expectation associated with an inclusion of QFTs with finite Jones index it is given by log(Jones Index)\log (\text{Jones Index}). The main technical tool in our work is a new variational principle for the BS divergence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.10013,
  title  = {Complexity in algebraic QFT},
  author = {Stefan Hollands and Alessio Ranallo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.10013},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

45pp, no figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:44:35.584Z