Ensemble Steering, Weak Self-Duality, and the Structure of Probabilistic Theories

Abstract

In any probabilistic theory, we may say a bipartite state on a composite system AB steers its marginal state (on, say, system B) if, for any decomposition of the marginal as a mixture, with probabilities p_i, of states b_i of B, there exists an observable a_i on A such that the states of B conditional on getting outcome a_i on A, are exactly the states b_i, and the probabilities of outcomes a_i are p_i. This is always so for pure bipartite states in quantum mechanics, a fact first observed by Schroedinger in 1935. Here, we show that, for weakly self-dual state spaces (those isomorphic, but perhaps not canonically isomorphic, to their dual spaces), the assumption that every state of a system A is steered by some bipartite state of a composite AA consisting of two copies of A, amounts to the homogeneity of the state cone. If the state space is actually self-dual, and not just weakly so, this implies (via the Koecher-Vinberg Theorem) that it is the self-adjoint part of a formally real Jordan algebra, and hence, quite close to being quantum mechanical.