From Pauli Matrices to Quantum Itô Formula

Abstract

This paper answers important questions raised by the recent description, by Attal, of a robust and explicit method to approximate basic objects of quantum stochastic calculus on bosonic Fock space by analogues on the state space of quantum spin chains. The existence of that method justifies a detailed investigation of discrete-time quantum stochastic calculus. Here we fully define and study that theory and obtain in particular a discrete-time quantum Ito formula, which one can see as summarizing the commutation relations of Pauli matrices. An apparent flaw in that approximation method is the difference in the quantum Ito formulas, discrete and continuous, which suggests that the discrete quantum stochastic calculus differs fundamentally from the continuous one and is therefore not a suitable object to approximate subtle phenomena. We show that flaw is only apparent by proving that the continuous-time quantum Ito formula is actually a consequence of its discrete-time counterpart.