The degenerate vertices of the $2$-qubit $\hat{I}›$-polytope and their update rules

Abstract

Recently, a class of objects, known as $\hat{I}›$-polytopes, were introduced for classically simulating universal quantum computation with magic states. In $\hat{I}›$-simulation, the probabilistic update of $\hat{I}›$ vertices under Pauli measurement yields dynamics consistent with quantum mechanics. Thus, an important open problem in the study of $\hat{I}›$-polytopes is characterizing its vertices and determining their update rules. In this paper, we obtain and describe the update of all degenerate vertices of $\hat{I}{›}_2$, the $2$-qubit $\hat{I}›$ polytope. Our approach exploits the fact that $\hat{I}{›}_2$ projects to a well-understood polytope $\text{MP}$ consisting of distributions on the Mermin square scenario. More precisely, we study the ``classical" polytope $\overline{\text{MP}}$, which is $\text{MP}$ intersected by the polytope defined by a set of Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequalities. Owing to a duality between CHSH inequalities and vertices of $\text{MP}$ we utilize a streamlined version of the double-description method for vertex enumeration to obtain certain vertices of $\overline{\text{MP}}$.

30 pages, 9 figures