Detecting consistency of overlapping quantum marginals by separability
Jianxin Chen, Zhengfeng Ji, Nengkun Yu, Bei Zeng · Physical Review A · 2016
The quantum marginal problem asks whether a set of given density matrices are consistent, i.e., whether they can be the reduced density matrices of a global quantum state. Not many nontrivial analytic necessary (or sufficient) conditions are known for the problem in general. We propose a method to detect consistency of overlapping quantum marginals by considering the separability of some derived states. Our method works well for the $k$-symmetric extension problem in general and for the general overlapping marginal problems in some cases. Our work is, in some sense, the converse to the well-known $k$-symmetric extension criterion for separability.