Analyzing causal structures using Tsallis entropies

Abstract

Understanding cause-effect relationships is a crucial part of the scientific process. As Bell's theorem shows, within a given causal structure, classical and quantum physics impose different constraints on the correlations that are realisable, a fundamental feature that has technological applications. However, in general it is difficult to distinguish the set of classical and quantum correlations within a causal structure. Here we investigate a method to do this based on using entropy vectors for Tsallis entropies. We derive constraints on the Tsallis entropies that are implied by (conditional) independence between classical random variables and apply these to causal structures. We find that the number of independent constraints needed to characterise the causal structure is prohibitively high such that the computations required for the standard entropy vector method cannot be employed even for small causal structures. Instead, without solving the whole problem, we find new Tsallis entropic constraints for the triangle causal structure by generalising known Shannon constraints. Our results reveal new mathematical properties of classical and quantum Tsallis entropies and highlight difficulties of using Tsallis entropies for analysing causal structures.