Simple and maximally robust processes with no classical common-cause or direct-cause explanation

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum processes that defy classical explanations based on common-cause and direct-cause relations, identifying simple, robust processes and exploring their properties and detection methods.

Contribution

It introduces simple quantum processes that are maximally robust against noise and demonstrates limitations of entanglement-based detection methods for non-classical CCDC processes.

Findings

Simple processes can be realized without explicit mixture of causal relations.

Existence of separable processes that are not direct-cause.

Semi-definite programming can detect and quantify non-classical CCDC robustness.

Abstract

Guided by the intuition of coherent superposition of causal relations, recent works presented quantum processes without classical common-cause and direct-cause explanation, that is, processes which cannot be written as probabilistic mixtures of quantum common-cause and quantum direct-cause relations (CCDC). In this work, we analyze the minimum requirements for a quantum process to fail to admit a CCDC explanation and present "simple" processes, which we prove to be the most robust ones against general noise. These simple processes can be realized by preparing a maximally entangled state and applying the identity quantum channel, thus not requiring an explicit coherent mixture of common-cause and direct-cause, exploiting the possibility of a process to have both relations simultaneously. We then prove that, although all bipartite direct-cause processes are bipartite separable operators, there exist bipartite separable processes which are not direct-cause. This shows that the problem of deciding weather a process is direct-cause process is not equivalent to entanglement certification and points out the limitations of entanglement methods to detect non-classical CCDC processes. We also present a semi-definite programming hierarchy that can detect and quantify the non-classical CCDC robustnesses of every non-classical CCDC process. Among other results, our numerical methods allow us to show that the simple processes presented here are likely to be also the maximally robust against white noise. Finally, we explore the equivalence between bipartite direct-cause processes and bipartite processes without quantum memory, to present a separable process which cannot be realized as a process without quantum memory.