Reconstructing quantum states from single-party information

The possible compatibility of density matrices for single-party subsystems is described by linear constraints on their respective spectra. Whenever some of those quantum marginal constraints are saturated, the total quantum state has a specific, simplified structure. We prove that these remarkable global implications of extremal local information are stable; i.e., they hold approximately for spectra close to the boundary of the allowed region. Application of this general result to fermionic quantum systems allows us to characterize natural extensions of the Hartree-Fock ansatz and to quantify their accuracy by resorting to one-particle information, only: The fraction of the correlation energy not recovered by such an ansatz can be estimated from above by a simple geometric quantity in the occupation number picture.

Figure 1

Left: Illustration of the distances $D\left({\vec{\lambda }}_0\right)$ and $S\left({\vec{\lambda }}_0\right)$ of ${\vec{\lambda }}_0$ (5) for the ground state $|{\mathrm{\Psi }}_0\rangle$ to the polytope facet $F_D$ (defining the variational ansatz) and to the Hartree-Fock point ${\vec{\lambda }}_{\mathrm{HF}}$, respectively. Right: The energy spectrum of the Hamiltonian $\widehat{H}$ is shown in black, and Hartree-Fock energy $E_{\mathrm{HF}}$ and the variational energy $E_D$ corresponding to $F_D$ are shown in gray.