Resource Marginal Problems

TL;DR

This paper introduces resource marginal problems to analyze the compatibility of marginal quantum states with resource-free target subsystems, establishing a resource theory framework with operational and computational insights.

Contribution

It formulates resource marginal problems, connects them to resource theories and operational advantages, and provides computability conditions and applications to entanglement problems.

Findings

Resource incompatibility induces a quantifiable resource theory.

Necessary and sufficient conditions for resource monotones as conic programs.

Operational advantages in channel discrimination linked to resource incompatibility.

Abstract

We introduce the resource marginal problems, which concern the possibility of having a resource-free target subsystem compatible with a given collection of marginal density matrices. By identifying an appropriate choice of resource R and target subsystem T, our problems reduce, respectively, to the well-known marginal problems for quantum states and the problem of determining if a given quantum system is a resource. More generally, we say that a set of marginal states is resource-free incompatible with a target subsystem T if all global states compatible with this set must result in a resourceful state in T of type R. We show that this incompatibility induces a resource theory that can be quantified by a monotone and obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for this monotone to be computable as a conic program with finite optimum. We further show, via the corresponding witnesses, that (1) resource-free incompatibility is equivalent to an operational advantage in some channel-discrimination tasks, and (2) some specific cases of such tasks fully characterize the convertibility between marginal density matrices exhibiting resource-free incompatibility. Through our framework, one sees a clear connection between any marginal problem -- which implicitly involves some notion of incompatibility -- for quantum states and a resource theory for quantum states. We also establish a close connection between the physical relevance of resource marginal problems and the ground state properties of certain many-body Hamiltonians. In terms of application, the universality of our framework leads, for example, to a further quantitative understanding of the incompatibility associated with the recently-proposed entanglement marginal problems and entanglement transitivity problems.