English

Paradox-free classical non-causality and unambiguous non-locality without entanglement are equivalent

Quantum Physics 2025-12-30 v1

Abstract

Closed timelike curves (CTCs) challenge our conception of causality by allowing information to loop back into its own past. Any consistent description of such scenarios must avoid time-travel paradoxes while respecting the no-new-physics principle, which requires that the set of operations available within any local spacetime region remain unchanged, irrespective of whether CTCs exist elsewhere. Within an information-theoretic framework, this leads to process functions: deterministic classical communication structures that remain logically consistent under arbitrary local operations, yet can exhibit correlations incompatible with any definite causal order - a phenomenon known as non-causality. In this work, we provide the first complete recursive characterization of process functions and of (non-)causal process functions. We use it to establish a correspondence between process functions and unambiguous complete product bases, i.e., product bases in which every local state belongs to a unique local basis. This equivalence implies that non-causality of process functions is exactly mirrored by quantum nonlocality without entanglement (QNLWE) - the impossibility of perfectly distinguishing separable states using local operations and causal classical communication - for such bases. Our results generalize previous special cases to arbitrary local dimensions and any number of parties, enable systematic constructions of non-causal process functions and unambiguous QNLWE bases, and reveal an unexpected connection between certain non-signaling inequalities and causal inequalities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.23599,
  title  = {Paradox-free classical non-causality and unambiguous non-locality without entanglement are equivalent},
  author = {Hippolyte Dourdent and Kyrylo Simonov and Andreas Leitherer and Emanuel-Cristian Boghiu and Ravi Kunjwal and Saronath Halder and Remigiusz Augusiak and Antonio Acín},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.23599},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 + 13 pages, 4 figures