Unambiguously determining the orthogonality of multiple quantum states

Abstract

In this article, we study an opposite problem of universal quantum state comparison, that is unambiguously determining whether multiple unknown quantum states from a Hilbert space are orthogonal or not. We show that no unambiguous quantum measurement can accomplish this task with a nonzero probability. Moreover, we extend the problem to a more general case, that is to compare how orthogonal multiple unknown quantum states are with a threshold, and it turns out that given any threshold this extended task is also impossible by any unambiguous quantum measurement except for a trivial case. It will be seen that the impossibility revealed in our problem is stronger than that in the universal quantum state comparison problem and distinct from those in the existing ``no-go'' theorems.