Quantum marginals, faces, and coatoms

TL;DR

This paper introduces an experimental method to identify coatoms in the lattice of quantum marginals, providing new insights into the structure of quantum states and their complexity.

Contribution

It presents a novel experimental approach to find coatoms in the quantum marginal set, including explicit examples for three-qubit systems.

Findings

Identified a family of coatoms of rank five in three-qubit Hamiltonians.

Established a link between ground projectors of frustration-free Hamiltonians and factorized probability distributions.

Discussed the nature of nonexposed points in the quantum marginals set.

Abstract

Many problems of quantum information theory rely on the set of quantum marginals. A precise knowledge of the faces of this convex set is necessary, for example, in the reconstruction of states from their marginals or in the evaluation of complexity measures of many-body systems. Yet, even the two-body marginals of just three qubits were only described in part. Here, we propose an experimental method to search for the coatoms in the lattice of exposed faces of the convex set of quantum marginals. The method is based on sampling from the extreme points of the dual spectrahedron. We provide an algebraic certificate of correctness, employing ground projectors of local Hamiltonians. Using this method, we present an explicit family of coatoms of rank five in the lattice of ground projectors of two-local three-qubit Hamiltonians (the rank is always six for bits). This family describes a family of coatoms in the lattice of exposed faces of the convex set of two-body marginals of three qubits. Besides introducing the experimental method, we show that the support sets of probability distributions that factor are the ground projectors of frustration-free Hamiltonians in the commutative setting. We also discuss nonexposed points of the set of marginals.