Guaranteeing completely positive quantum evolution

Abstract

In open quantum systems, it is known that if the system and environment are in a product state, the evolution of the system is given by a linear completely positive (CP) Hermitian map. CP maps are a subset of general linear Hermitian maps, which also include non completely positive (NCP) maps. NCP maps can arise in evolutions such as non-Markovian evolution, where the CP divisibility of the map (writing the overall evolution as a composition of CP maps) usually fails. Positive but NCP maps are also useful as entanglement witnesses. In this paper, we focus on transforming an initial NCP map to a CP map through composition with the asymmetric depolarizing map. We use separate asymmetric depolarizing maps acting on the individual subsystems. Previous work have looked at structural physical approximation (SPA), which is a CP approximation of an NCP map using a mixture of the NCP map with a completely depolarizing map. We prove that the composition can always be made CP without completely depolarizing in any direction. It is possible to depolarize less in some directions. We give the general proof by using the Choi matrix and an isomorphism from a maximally entangled two qudit state to a set of qubits. We also give measures that describe the amount of disturbance the depolarization introduces to the original map. Given our measures, we show that asymmetric depolarization has many advantages over SPA in preserving the structure of the original NCP map. Finally, we give some examples. For some measures and examples, completely depolarizing (while not necessary) in some directions can give a better approximation than keeping the depolarizing parameters bounded by the required depolarization if symmetric depolarization is used.