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Homomorphism Indistinguishability Relations induced by Quantum Groups

Quantum Physics 2026-04-21 v2 Combinatorics Operator Algebras Quantum Algebra

Abstract

Homomorphism indistinguishability is a way of characterising many natural equivalence relations on graphs. Two graphs GG and HH are called homomorphism indistinguishable over a graph class F\mathcal{F} if for each FFF \in \mathcal{F}, the number of homomorphisms from FF to GG equals the number of homomorphisms from FF to HH. Examples of such equivalence relations include isomorphism and cospectrality, as well as equivalence with respect to many formal logics. Quantum groups are a generalisation of topological groups that describe "non-commutative symmetries" and, inter alia, have applications in quantum information theory. An important subclass are the easy quantum groups, which enjoy a combinatorial characterisation and have been fully classified by Raum and Weber. A recent connection between these seemingly distant concepts was made by Man\v{c}inska and Roberson, who showed that quantum isomorphism, a relaxation of classical isomorphism that can be phrased in terms of the quantum symmetric group, is equivalent to homomorphism indistinguishability over the class of planar graphs. We generalise Man\v{c}inska and Roberson's result to all orthogonal easy quantum groups. We obtain for each orthogonal easy quantum group a graph isomorphism relaxation \approx and a graph class F\mathcal{F}, such that homomorphism indistinguishability over F\mathcal{F} coincides with \approx. Our results include a full classification of the (0,0)(0, 0)-intertwiners of the graph-theoretic quantum group obtained by adding the adjacency matrix of a graph to the intertwiners of an orthogonal easy quantum group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.07922,
  title  = {Homomorphism Indistinguishability Relations induced by Quantum Groups},
  author = {Tim Seppelt and Gian Luca Spitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.07922},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Simplified Lemma 45, corrected typos in Theorem 60

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:30:16.499Z