Phase-Flag Access and No-Go Constraints on Quotient-Space Real Quantum Mechanics
quant-ph
Submitted: 2026-07-27
Updated: 2026-07-27
Comments: This work is a follow-up to our previous study, arXiv:2607.05865
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The gist: Barrios Hita et al.
Terminology
Abstract
Barrios Hita et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 240202 (2026)] proposed a quotient-space formulation of quantum mechanics over the real numbers and concluded that complex numbers are only a convenience. A preceding analysis [arXiv:2607.05865] showed that, when the construction is empirically equivalent to complex quantum mechanics, its real flag is protected by a hidden complex structure and its composition rule is the balanced tensor product over that structure. Here we ask what would follow from the stronger operational reading that the flag is an accessible real degree of freedom. The answer is a direct clash with overlap-determinability (OD), introduced in [arXiv:2601.14638], and with standard no-go theorems. A readable or coherently controllable flag fixes a representative of each ray, and hence supplies precisely the phase convention that OD identifies as the missing resource for universal superposition of unknown states. Once promoted to a generic phase-access primitive, this resource enables probabilistic cloning of a linearly dependent set, steering-based signaling, and logarithmic-query unstructured search. Thus the quotient construction has a sharp follow-up interpretation: as a protected gauge representation it is standard complex quantum mechanics in real notation; as an accessible real theory it leaves the quantum operational framework.
Sources
- Hidden Complex Structure in Quotient-Space Real Quantum Mechanics
- Quantum Interference Needs Convention: Overlap-Determinability and Unified No-Superposition Principle
- On whether quantum theory needs complex numbers: the foil theories perspective
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