Compressing the hidden variable space of a qubit

Abstract

In previously exhibited hidden variable models of quantum state preparation and measurement, the number of continuous hidden variables describing the actual state of a single realization is never smaller than the quantum state manifold dimension. We introduce a simple model for a qubit whose hidden variable space is one-dimensional, i.e., smaller than the two-dimensional Bloch sphere. The hidden variable probability distributions associated with the quantum states satisfy reasonable criteria of regularity. Possible generalizations of this shrinking to a N-dimensional Hilbert space are discussed.