Quantum Earth mover's distance, No-go Quantum Kantorovich-Rubinstein theorem, and Quantum Marginal Problem

Abstract

The earth mover's distance is a measure of the distance between two probabilistic measures. It plays a fundamental role in mathematics and computer science. The Kantorovich-Rubinstein theorem provides a formula for the earth mover's distance on the space of regular probability Borel measures on a compact metric space. In this paper, we investigate the quantum earth mover's distance. We show a no-go Kantorovich-Rubinstein theorem in the quantum setting. More precisely, we show that the trace distance between two quantum states can not be determined by their earth mover's distance. The technique here is to track the bipartite quantum marginal problem. Then we provide inequality to describe the structure of quantum coupling, which can be regarded as quantum generalization of Kantorovich-Rubinstein theorem. After that, we generalize it to obtain into the tripartite version, and build a new class of necessary criteria for the tripartite marginal problem.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:quant-ph/0506138 by other author