English

Quantum state exclusion with many copies

Quantum Physics 2026-02-06 v2

Abstract

Quantum state exclusion is the task of identifying at least one state from a known set that was not used in the preparation of a quantum system. A set of quantum states is said to admit state exclusion if there exists a measurement whose outcomes can be put in one-to-one correspondence with the states in the set, such that each outcome rules out its corresponding state with certainty (while possibly also ruling out other states), and each outcome occurs with nonzero probability for at least one state in the set. State exclusion, however, is not always possible in the single-copy setting. In this paper, we investigate whether access to multiple identical copies of the system enables state exclusion. We prove that for any set of three or more pure states, state exclusion becomes possible with a finite number of copies. Moreover, we show that the number of copies required may be arbitrarily large: in particular, for every natural number NN, we construct sets of states for which state exclusion remains impossible with NN or fewer copies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.14410,
  title  = {Quantum state exclusion with many copies},
  author = {Debanjan Roy and Tathagata Gupta and Pratik Ghosal and Samrat Sen and Somshubhro Bandyopadhyay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14410},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Updated version; reference and clarification about terminology added

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:13:08.562Z