The Quantum Homomorphism Orders are Universal

Abstract

Quantum graph homomorphisms, introduced by Mančinska and Roberson, form a natural quantum relaxation of classical graph homomorphisms. Since this relaxation may create new comparabilities, it could in principle collapse antichains and other order-theoretic configurations. We prove that this does not happen: the quantum homomorphism quasi-order of finite directed graphs is countably universal, and the quantum homomorphism quasi-order of finite planar graphs of maximum degree at most $7$ is also countably universal. Consequently, the same universality holds for finite undirected graphs and for the corresponding quotient partial orders. The result is constructive for finite patterns. Given any finite poset $P$, we explicitly construct finite planar graphs $G_p$, $p\in P$, with $Δ(G_p)\le 7$, such that \[ p\le_P q \quad\Longleftrightarrow\quad G_p\toq G_q. \] For directed graphs, the proof uses disjoint unions of clockwise directed cycles, where quantum and classical homomorphisms coincide. For undirected graphs, the main ingredient is a finite ordered indicator whose terminals are quantum endpoint-forcing. This gives a quantum analogue of the classical ordered-indicator method: the classical endpoint-image condition is replaced by the projection-level vanishing condition \[ F_{a,p}F_{b,q}=0 \] for every illegal ordered terminal pair. The fixed indicator encodes directed-cycle constructions inside planar bounded-degree graphs without creating extra quantum homomorphisms.