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Consistency of Local Density Matrices is QMA-complete

Yi-Kai Liu
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Abstract

Suppose we have an n-qubit system, and we are given a collection of local density matrices rho_1,...,rho_m, where each rho_i describes a subset C_i of the qubits. We say that the rho_i are ``consistent'' if there exists some global state sigma (on all n qubits) that matches each of the rho_i on the subsets C_i. This generalizes the classical notion of the consistency of marginal probability distributions. We show that deciding the consistency of local density matrices is QMA-complete (where QMA is the quantum analogue of NP). This gives an interesting example of a hard problem in QMA. Our proof is somewhat unusual: we give a Turing reduction from Local Hamiltonian, using a convex optimization algorithm by Bertsimas and Vempala, which is based on random sampling. Unlike in the classical case, simple mapping reductions do not seem to work here.

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Yi-Kai Liu. 2007-12-10. Consistency of Local Density Matrices is QMA-complete. https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604166

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