Thursday, March 12, 2015

quantum mechanics - Bell polytopes with nontrivial symmetries


Take N parties, each of which receives an input si1,,mi and produces an output ri1,,vi, possibly in a nondeterministic manner. We are interested in joint conditional probabilities of the form p(r1r2rN|s1s2sN). Bell polytope is the polytope spanned by the probability distributions of the form p(r1r2rN|s1s2sN)=δr1,r1,s1δrN,rN,sN for all possible choices of numbers ri,si (in other words, each input si produces a result ri,si either with probability 0 or 1, regardless of other players' inputs).


Every Bell polytope has a certain amount of trivial symmetries, like permutation of parties or relabelling of inputs or outputs. Is it possible to give an explicit Bell polytope with nontrivial symmetries? (e.g. transformations of the polytope into itself that takes faces to faces and is not trivial in the above sense) In other words, I'm interested whether a specific Bell scenario can possess any "hidden" symmetries


Bell polytopes in literature are usually characterized by their faces, given by sets of inequalities (Bell inequalities), which, however, usually do not have any manifest symmetry group.



Answer



Any symmetry of the local hidden variable polytope must map a vertex of the polytope to another other vertex (or trivially to itself). This is true in general by convexity. By the duality between vertex representation and facet representation we only need consider vertices. I have modified the way you write vertices to obtain p(r1r2...rN|s1s2...sN)=δr1f1(s1)δr2f1(s2)...δrNfN(sN) where fj(sj) is the image of sj under a single-site function fj:ZmjZvj.



Therefore, a symmetry will map from the product of single-site maps δr1f1(s1)δr2f1(s2)...δrNfN(sN) to other products of single-site maps δr1f1(s1)δr2f1(s2)...δrNfN(sN) with fj not necessarily equal to fj. Of course, one can reorder the products by permuting the parties and still produce a product of delta functions. Locality prevents us from allowing delta functions of the form δrjfj(sj) with jj. Therefore, other than permutations the only symmetry transformations that are allowed will be transformations on the maps fj(sj)fj(sj).


We only need to consider each site's marginal probability distribution p(rj|sj) which can be written as a mjvj length real vector. The vertices have mj non-zero elements which have unity value for each value of sj. In order to conserve these two conditions of the vertex probability distributions, the only allowed transformations on the real vectors that are allowed are a restricted class of permutations of row elements. The restricted class of permutations of row elements is naturally generated by relabelling a measurement outcome for each value of sj and relabelling values of sj.


This applies for the full probability distribution polytope. However, for other forms of correlations such as joint outcome statistics, e.g. p(njrj|s1s2...sN) there are other subtle forms of symmetry outside of the 'trivial' classes. If you want me to elaborate, I can.


This is my first post to the TP.SE. I'm sorry if it is not detailed enough.


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