Published April 2009 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Finite de Finetti theorem for conditional probability distributions describing physical theories

  • 1. ROR icon University of Cambridge
  • 2. ROR icon Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  • 3. ROR icon University of Melbourne
  • 4. ROR icon Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
  • 5. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We work in a general framework where the state of a physical system is defined by its behavior under measurement and the global state is constrained by no-signaling conditions. We show that the marginals of symmetric states in such theories can be approximated by convex combinations of independent and identical conditional probability distributions, generalizing the classical finite de Finetti theorem of Diaconis and Freedman. Our results apply to correlations obtained from quantum states even when there is no bound on the local dimension, so that known quantum de Finetti theorems cannot be used.

Additional Information

© 2009 American Institute of Physics. Received 27 July 2008; accepted 17 March 2009; published online 15 April 2009. This work was carried out at the same time as related work by J. Barrett and M. Leifer.14 We thank them for discussions, and especially for explaining how to define the trace distance. We thank R. Colbeck and R. Renner for discussions, G. Mitchison for valuable comments on the manuscript, and the organizers of the FQXi workshop Operational Probabilistic Theories as Foils to Quantum Theory, where part of this work was done. M.C. thanks the IQI at Caltech and CWI Amsterdam for their hospitality. This work was supported by a UK EPSRC Research Fellowship, Magdalene College Cambridge, NSF Grant Nos. PHY-0456720 and CCF-0524828, EU Projects SCALA (Grant No. CT-015714) and QAP (Grant No. CT-015848), NWO VICI Project No. 639- 023-302, and the Dutch BSIK/BRICKS project.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
14565
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20090713-084408363

Funding

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Magdalene College Cambridge
NSF
PHY-0456720
NSF
CCF-0524828
European Union
CT-015714
European Union
CT-015848
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
639023-302
Basic Research in Informatics for Creating the Knowledge Society

Dates

Created
2009-08-20
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-08
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