Gap between quantum theory based on real and complex numbers is arbitrarily large

Abstract:Quantum Information Theory, the standard formalism used to represent information contained in quantum systems, is based on complex Hilbert spaces (CQT). It was recently shown that it predicts correlations in quantum networks which cannot be explained by Real Quantum Theory (RQT), a quantum theory with real Hilbert spaces instead of complex ones, when three parties are involved in a quantum network with non-trivial locality constraints. In this work, we study a scenario with $N+1$ parties sharing quantum systems in a star network. Here, we construct a "conditional" multipartite Bell inequality that exhibits a gap between RQT and CQT, which linearly increases with $N$ and is thus arbitrarily large in the asymptotic limit. This implies, that, as the number of parties grows, Hilbert space formalism based on real numbers becomes exceedingly worse at describing complex networks of quantum systems. Furthermore, we also compute the tolerance of this gap to experimental errors.

RQT with standard tensor product structure!

arXiv:2503.09724 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2503.09724v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.09724 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Rep. Prog. Phys. 89 070503 (2026)

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/ae871e Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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