Forbidden Subspaces in Quantum State Smoothing

Abstract

A system between a preparation and a post-selection has had no agreed state since 1964. With positivity as the criterion, a post-selection admits an interval of orderings around the symmetric one exactly when the subspace it forbids is spanned by eigenvectors of a full-rank filtered state. Otherwise it certifies contextuality, testable on a qubit. The averaged filtered state carries the entanglement spectrum of the record, so the smallest forbidden subspaces a symmetry allows are even-dimensional in the Haldane class and odd in the trivial one. That parity is the record's topological class.