English

Spatial Incompatibility Witnesses for Quantum Temporal Correlations

Quantum Physics 2025-11-14 v2

Abstract

We introduce a witness-based framework for certifying quantum temporal correlations via the pseudo-density matrix (PDM) formalism, which is a spatiotemporal generalization of the density matrix. We define spatial incompatibility (SI) as the minimum distance between a PDM and valid density matrices. For trace-norm distance, we show that this reduces to the PDM's negativity, enabling the construction of experimentally accessible SI witnesses. We derive a tight bound on SI for quantum channels and analyze the respective roles of state and channel coherence in witnessing SI. Our approach, unlike the LG framework, exploits measurements that generate coherence through state disturbance. We further show that channels satisfying the LG inequality for incoherent states can still exhibit detectable SI, demonstrating that measurement disturbance enhances the certification of temporal correlations.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.01179,
  title  = {Spatial Incompatibility Witnesses for Quantum Temporal Correlations},
  author = {Xiangjing Liu and Harshit Verma and Yunlong Xiao and Oscar Dahlsten and Mile Gu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.01179},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

17 pages, 2 figures, updated Propsition 4, Comments are welcome!

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:18:30.209Z