A de Finetti theorem for quantum causal structures
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.
Authors
- Jonathan Barrett (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2222-0579)
- Sally Shrapnel
- Fabio Costa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6547-6005)
Institutions
- Stockholm University (SE)
- The University of Queensland (AU)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (AU)
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology (SE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Quantum
- Published
- 2025-02-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2025-02-11-1628
- Primary Topic
- Quantum Mechanics and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- John Templeton Foundation
- NordForsk
- Australian Research Council