Indiscernibility of quantum states

TL;DR

This paper explores how quantum states are defined up to what can be distinguished by a set of observables, analyzing the resulting geometric and topological structures of these equivalence classes and their implications in quantum measurement scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a formal framework for understanding quantum states as equivalence classes based on observable measurements, with a classical representation theorem and explicit examples.

Findings

The Holevo space captures the effective state space based on available measurements.

In the EPR scenario, joint and marginal descriptions differ in the effective state space.

Varying measurement settings reshuffle indiscernibility classes, affecting observable algebra compatibility.

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic study of the operational idea that a quantum ``state'' is only defined up to what can be distinguished by a chosen family of observables. Concretely, any von Neumann algebra of observables $\mathscr{M}$ induces an equivalence relation on pure and mixed states by declaring two preparations indiscernible when they give identical statistics for every observable in $\mathscr{M}$. The corresponding quotient, the \emph{Holevo space} associated with $\mathscr{M}$, is the effective (relational) state space of the experiment, explicitly dependent on the observer's available measurements. We analyse the resulting geometry and topology of these quotients, and prove a context-complete classical representation theorem: for every von Neumann algebra $\mathscr{M}$ there is a canonical lift $a\mapsto \widehat a$ to bounded continuous functions on the Holevo space, reproducing expectation values pointwise. In the commutative case this reduces to ordinary probability theory on the joint spectrum. The framework is illustrated in explicit examples, including position measurements of a free particle and polarisation measurements in the qubit, EPR, and Bell settings. In particular, in the EPR scenario, Charlie's joint observable defines a simplex of joint outcome distributions, whereas the Alice/Bob marginal viewpoint collapses the effective description to a lower-dimensional space by ``forgetting'' the correlation parameter. We show that by varying the polariser settings, the indiscernibility classes become conjugated (and generically reshuffled), and different settings are typically incompatible at the level of observable algebras.