English

A de Finetti theorem for quantum causal structures

Quantum Physics 2025-02-12 v3

Abstract

What does it mean for a causal structure to be `unknown'? Can we even talk about `repetitions' of an experiment without prior knowledge of causal relations? And under what conditions can we say that a set of processes with arbitrary, possibly indefinite, causal structure are independent and identically distributed? Similar questions for classical probabilities, quantum states, and quantum channels are beautifully answered by so-called "de Finetti theorems", which connect a simple and easy-to-justify condition -- symmetry under exchange -- with a very particular multipartite structure: a mixture of identical states/channels. Here we extend the result to processes with arbitrary causal structure, including indefinite causal order and multi-time, non-Markovian processes applicable to noisy quantum devices. The result also implies a new class of de Finetti theorems for quantum states subject to a large class of linear constraints, which can be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.10316,
  title  = {A de Finetti theorem for quantum causal structures},
  author = {Fabio Costa and Jonathan Barrett and Sally Shrapnel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.10316},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted version, minor revisions. 11 main + 4 references + 5 appendix = 20 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:21:46.480Z