Characterising transformations between quantum objects, 'completeness' of quantum properties, and transformations without a fixed causal order

Abstract

Many fundamental and key objects in quantum mechanics are linear mappings between particular affine/linear spaces. This structure includes basic quantum elements such as states, measurements, channels, instruments, non-signalling channels and channels with memory, and also higher-order operations such as superchannels, quantum combs, n-time processes, testers, and process matrices which may not respect a definite causal order. Deducing and characterising their structural properties in terms of linear and semidefinite constraints is not only of foundational relevance, but plays an important role in enabling the numerical optimisation over sets of quantum objects and allowing simpler connections between different concepts and objects. Here, we provide a general framework to deduce these properties in a direct and easy to use way. While primarily guided by practical quantum mechanical considerations, we also extend our analysis to mappings between general linear/affine spaces and derive their properties, opening the possibility for analysing sets which are not explicitly forbidden by quantum theory, but are still not much explored. Together, these results yield versatile and readily applicable tools for all tasks that require the characterisation of linear transformations, in quantum mechanics and beyond. As an application of our methods, we discuss how the existence of indefinite causality naturally emerges in higher-order quantum transformations and provide a simple strategy for the characterisation of mappings that have to preserve properties in a 'complete' sense, i.e., when acting non-trivially only on parts of an input space.