Reconstructing the whole from its parts

Abstract

The quantum marginal problem consists in deciding whether a given set of marginal reductions is compatible with the existence of a global quantum state or not. In this work, we formulate the problem from the perspective of dynamical systems theory and study its advantages with respect to the standard approach. The introduced formalism allows us to analytically determine global quantum states from a wide class of self-consistent marginal reductions in any multipartite scenario. In particular, we show that any self-consistent set of multipartite marginal reductions is compatible with the existence of a global quantum state, after passing through a depolarizing channel. This result reveals that the complexity associated to the marginal problem can be drastically reduced when restricting the attention to sufficiently mixed marginals. We also formulate the marginal problem in a compressed way, in the sense that the total number of scalar constraints is smaller than the one required by the standard approach. This fact suggests an exponential speedup in runtime when considering semi-definite programming techniques to solve it, in both classical and quantum algorithms. Finally, we reconstruct $n$-qubit quantum states from all the $\binom{n}{k}$ marginal reductions to $k$ parties, generated from randomly chosen mixed states. Numerical simulations reveal that the fraction of cases where we can find a global state equals 1 when $5\leq n\leq12$ and $\lfloor(n-1)/\sqrt{2}\rfloor\leq k\leq n-1$, where $\lfloor\cdot\rfloor$ denotes the floor function.