Coordination Requires a Common Cause in Quantum Theory
Summarize this article with:
Quantum Physics arXiv:2605.03120 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 4 May 2026] Title:Coordination Requires a Common Cause in Quantum Theory Authors:Daniel Centeno, Antoine Coquet, Maria Ciudad Alañón, Lucas Tendick, Marc-Olivier Renou, Elie Wolfe View a PDF of the paper titled Coordination Requires a Common Cause in Quantum Theory, by Daniel Centeno and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We propose a novel causal principle that is a genuinely multipartite extension of Reichenbach's common cause principle, namely, the coordination principle: parties in a network can achieve perfect randomized coordination--in particular, agree on a uniformly random output--only if they all share a common cause. We show that this principle does not follow from the standard no-signaling and independence principles by providing an explicit theory satisfying all these principles while violating the coordination principle. Strikingly, we prove that the coordination principle holds, however, in quantum theory for four parties, and derive noise-tolerant Bell-like inequalities that certify a common cause. We then extend these results to a genuinely quantum coordination task, showing that the four-partite GHZ state requires a quantum common cause which can also be certified by experimentally accessible Bell-like inequalities. A companion paper generalizes these results for N parties, proving that the coordination principle is satisfied in general for quantum theory. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2605.03120 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2605.03120v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.03120 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Daniel Centeno Díaz [view email] [v1] Mon, 4 May 2026 20:00:32 UTC (41 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Coordination Requires a Common Cause in Quantum Theory, by Daniel Centeno and 4 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-05 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)