Constraining the state space in any physical theory with the principle of information symmetry

Abstract

Symmetry shares an entwined history with the structure of physical theory. We propose a consequence of symmetry towards the axiomatic derivation of Hilbert space quantum theory. We introduce the notion of information symmetry (IS) and show that it constraints the state-space structure in any physical theory. To this end, we study the minimal error binary state discrimination problem in the framework of generalized probabilistic theories. A theory is said to satisfy IS if the probability of incorrectly identifying each of two randomly prepared states is the same for both the states. It is found that this simple principle rules out several classes of theories while being perfectly compatible with quantum theory.