English

Quantum space-time marginal problem: global causal structure from local causal information

Quantum Physics 2023-12-22 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Spatial and temporal quantum correlations can be unified in the framework of the pseudo-density operators, and quantum causality between the involved events in an experiment is encoded in the corresponding pseudo-density operator. We study the relationship between local causal information and global causal structure. A space-time marginal problem is proposed to infer global causal structures from given marginal causal structures where causal structures are represented by the pseudo-density operators; we show that there almost always exists a solution in this case. By imposing the corresponding constraints on this solution set, we could obtain the required solutions for special classes of marginal problems, like a positive semidefinite marginal problem, separable marginal problem, etc. We introduce a space-time entropy and propose a method to determine the global causal structure based on the maximum entropy principle, which can be solved effectively by using a neural network. The notion of quantum pseudo-channel is also introduced and we demonstrate that the quantum pseudo-channel marginal problem can be solved by transforming it into a pseudo-density operator marginal problem via the channel-state duality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.12819,
  title  = {Quantum space-time marginal problem: global causal structure from local causal information},
  author = {Zhian Jia and Minjeong Song and Dagomir Kaszlikowski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.12819},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

v1: 17 pages, comments welcome; v2: re-organize the structure of the paper

R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:28:41.512Z