An Epistemic model of Quantum State with Ontic Probability Amplitude

Abstract: We first prove that ontological models of the quantum state which are capable of reproducing the Born probability rule and fall in the class of $\psi$-epistemic models are inconsistent with the Sch{\"o}dinger time evolution. We then model the ontic state space as a complex projective Hilbert space that embeds the projective Hilbert space of quantum mechanics and define a minimalist epistemic state as an average over a set of "hidden states" in the larger space. We show that such a model incorporates probability amplitudes and admits an epistemic interpretation of quantum states. Finally, we prove a second theorem to show that such a model is compatible with locality but ontic models are not.