Core Concepts
All notions of quantum expansion based on Schatten-p norms are equivalent.
Abstract
The content discusses the problem of showing that certain notions of quantum expansion are equivalent. Quantum expansion is an analogue of the well-studied concept of graph expansion, which has many equivalent versions that play an important role in various fields.
The authors introduce two notions of quantum expansion: the quantum edge expansion (hQ) and the dimension edge expansion (hD). They show that these two notions are not equivalent by exhibiting a sequence of bistochastic tuples Bm such that inf hD(Bm) > 0 but inf hQ(Bm) = 0.
To further explore this, the authors consider a different expression of hQ in terms of the Schatten-2 norm, denoted as hS2. They generalize this to other Schatten-p norms, defining hSp as:
hSp(B) = min_{V < Cn, dim V ≤ n/2} Σ_i ||Bi|V⊥,V||_Sp / (d dim V)
The authors show that all these Sp notions of quantum expansion are equivalent, proving the following theorem:
Theorem 1:
hSp(B) ≤ d^((p-q)/2) * hSq(B)
hSp(B) ≥ [hSq(B)]^(p/q)
In particular, hSp and hSq are equivalent for every p, q ∈ [1, ∞).
The authors discuss how this result can be seen as a quantum analogue of the equivalence between certain notions of graph expansion based on ℓp norms, as shown by Matoušek. However, they believe the analogy is more notational than operational and does not help in constructing finite metric spaces that are hard to embed into Sp.
The authors propose an open question: What is the minimum distortion Dn,Sp needed to embed any n-point metric space into Sp?