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Quantum Max-Flow Min-Cut theorem

Quantum Physics 2025-07-15 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

The max-flow min-cut theorem is a cornerstone result in combinatorial optimization. Calegari et al. (arXiv:0802.3208) initialized the study of quantum max-flow min-cut conjecture, which connects the rank of a tensor network and the min-cut. Cui et al. (arXiv:1508.04644) showed that this conjecture is false generally. In this paper, we establish a quantum max-flow min-cut theorem for a new definition of quantum maximum flow. In particular, we show that for any quantum tensor network, there are infinitely many nn, such that quantum max-flow equals quantum min-cut, after attaching dimension nn maximally entangled state to each edge as ancilla. Our result implies that the ratio of the quantum max-flow to the quantum min-cut converges to 11 as the dimension nn tends to infinity. As a direct application, we prove the validity of the asymptotical version of the open problem about the quantum max-flow and the min-cut, proposed in Cui et al. (arXiv:1508.04644 ).

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.00905,
  title  = {Quantum Max-Flow Min-Cut theorem},
  author = {Nengkun Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.00905},
  year   = {2025}
}

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R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:34:49.313Z