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arXiv · 2403.10316

A de Finetti theorem for quantum causal structures

Fabio Costa·Jonathan Barrett·Sally Shrapnel
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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.

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Fabio Costa, Jonathan Barrett, Sally Shrapnel. 2024-03-15. A de Finetti theorem for quantum causal structures. https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2025-02-11-1628

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