Ensemble Of Quantum States Research Articles

On quantum channels generated by covariant positive operator-valued measures on a locally compact group

We introduce positive operator-valued measure (POVM) generated by the projective unitary representation of a direct product of locally compact Abelian group G with its dual \({\hat{G}}\). The method is based upon the Pontryagin duality allowing to establish an isometrical isomorphism between the space of Hilbert–Schmidt operators in \(L^2(G)\) and the Hilbert space \(L^2({\hat{G}}\times G)\). Any such a measure determines a pair of hybrid (containing classical and quantum parts) quantum channels consisting of the measurement channel and the channel transmitting an initial quantum state to the ensemble of quantum states on the group. It is shown that the second channel can be called a complementary channel to the measurement channel.

Symmetry-resolved Page curves

Given a statistical ensemble of quantum states, the corresponding Page curve quantifies the average entanglement entropy associated with each possible spatial bipartition of the system. In this work, we study a natural extension in the presence of a conservation law and introduce the symmetry-resolved Page curves, characterizing average bipartite symmetry-resolved entanglement entropies. We derive explicit analytic formulae for two important statistical ensembles with a $U(1)$-symmetry: Haar-random pure states and random fermionic Gaussian states. In the former case, the symmetry-resolved Page curves can be obtained in an elementary way from the knowledge of the standard one. This is not true for random fermionic Gaussian states. In this case, we derive an analytic result in the thermodynamic limit based on a combination of techniques from random-matrix and large-deviation theories. We test our predictions against numerical calculations and discuss the sub-leading finite-size corrections.

Exact Emergent Quantum State Designs from Quantum Chaotic Dynamics.

We present exact results on a novel kind of emergent random matrix universality that quantum many-body systems at infinite temperature can exhibit. Specifically, we consider an ensemble of pure states supported on a small subsystem, generated from projective measurements of the remainder of the system in a local basis. We rigorously show that the ensemble, derived for a class of quantum chaotic systems undergoing quench dynamics, approaches a universal form completely independent of system details: it becomes uniformly distributed in Hilbert space. This goes beyond the standard paradigm of quantum thermalization, which dictates that the subsystem relaxes to an ensemble of quantum states that reproduces the expectation values of local observables in a thermal mixed state. Our results imply more generally that the distribution of quantum states themselves becomes indistinguishable from those of uniformly random ones, i.e., the ensemble forms a quantum state design in the parlance of quantum information theory. Our work establishes bridges between quantum many-body physics, quantum information and random matrix theory, by showing that pseudorandom states can arise from isolated quantum dynamics, opening up new ways to design applications for quantum state tomography and benchmarking.

Quantifying the Quantumness of an Ensemble of Quantum States

The characterization of the quantum ensemble is a fundamental issue in quantum information theory and foundations. The ensemble is also useful for various quantum information processing. To characterize the quantum ensemble, in this article, we generalize the coherence measure of a state to the quantum ensemble. Exploiting the fidelity and affinity between the ensemble, we propose a quantumness quantifier for the quantum ensemble. It is shown that the proposed quantifier satisfies the necessary axioms of a bonafide measure of quantumness. Finally, we compute the quantumness of a few well-known ensembles.

Holevo information and ensemble theory of gravity

Holevo information is an upper bound for the accessible classical information of an ensemble of quantum states. In this work, we use Holevo information to investigate the ensemble theory interpretation of quantum gravity. We study the Holevo information in random tensor network states, where the random parameters are the random tensors at each vertex. Based on the results in random tensor network models, we propose a conjecture on the holographic bulk formula of the Holevo information in the gravity case. As concrete examples of holographic systems, we compute the Holevo information in the ensemble of thermal states and thermo-field double states in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. The results are consistent with our conjecture.

The compatibility dimension of quantum measurements

We introduce the notion of compatibility dimension for a set of quantum measurements: it is the largest dimension of a Hilbert space on which the given measurements are compatible. In the Schrödinger picture, this notion corresponds to testing compatibility with ensembles of quantum states supported on a subspace, using the incompatibility witnesses of Carmeli, Heinosaari, and Toigo [Phys. Rev. A 98,012126 (2018) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 130402 (2019).]. We provide several bounds for the compatibility dimension using approximate quantum cloning or algebraic techniques inspired by quantum error correction. We analyze in detail the case of two orthonormal bases and, in particular, that of mutually unbiased bases.

On the Entanglement Cost of One-Shot Compression

We revisit the task of visible compression of an ensemble of quantum states with entanglement assistance in the one-shot setting. The protocols achieving the best compression use many more qubits of shared entanglement than the number of qubits in the states in the ensemble. Other compression protocols, with potentially larger communication cost, have entanglement cost bounded by the number of qubits in the given states. This motivates the question as to whether entanglement is truly necessary for compression, and if so, how much of it is needed. Motivated by questions in communication complexity, we lift certain restrictions that are placed on compression protocols in tasks such as state-splitting and channel simulation. We show that an ensemble of the form designed by Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen (ICALP'03) saturates the known bounds on the sum of communication and entanglement costs, even with the relaxed compression protocols we study. The ensemble and the associated one-way communication protocol have several remarkable properties. The ensemble is incompressible by more than a constant number of qubits without shared entanglement, even when constant error is allowed. Moreover, in the presence of shared entanglement, the communication cost of compression can be arbitrarily smaller than the entanglement cost. The quantum information cost of the protocol can thus be arbitrarily smaller than the cost of compression without shared entanglement. The ensemble can also be used to show the impossibility of reducing, via compression, the shared entanglement used in two-party protocols for computing Boolean functions.

Signaling versus distinguishing different preparations of same pure quantum state

Different ensembles of quantum states can have the same average nonpure state. Distinguishing between such constructions, via different mixing procedures of the same nonpure quantum state, is known to entail signaling. In parallel, different superpositions of pure quantum states can lead to the same pure state. We show that the possibility of distinguishing between such preparations, via different interferometric setups leading to the same pure quantum state, also implies signaling. The implication holds irrespective of whether the distinguishing procedure is deterministic or probabilistic.

Low-cost limit of classical communication with restricted quantum measurements

We consider a communication scenario where classical information is encoded in an ensemble of quantum states that admit a power series expansion in a cost parameter and converge to a single zero cost state with vanishing cost. For a given measurement scheme, we derive an approximate expression for mutual information in the leading order of the cost parameter. The general results are applied to selected problems in optical communication, where coherent states of light are used as input symbols and the cost is quantified as the average number of photons per symbol. We show that for an arbitrary individual measurement on phase shift keyed (PSK) symbols, the photon information efficiency is upper bounded by 2 nats of information per photon in the low-cost limit, which coincides with the conventional homodyne detection bound. The presented low-cost approximation facilitates a systematic analysis of few-symbol measurements that exhibit superadditivity of accessible information. For the binary PSK alphabet of coherent states, we present designs for two- and three-symbol measurement schemes based on linear optics, homodyning, and single photon detection that offer respectively 2.49% and 3.40% enhancement relative to individual measurements. We also show how designs for scalable superadditive measurement schemes emerge from the introduced low-cost formalism.

Coherence of Quantum Ensemble as a Dual to Uncertainty for a Single Observable

The coherence of an ensemble of quantum states is considered — a quantity having a similarity with the uncertainty of the quantum observable that arises from the entropic uncertainty relations. We give estimates for the coherence of the ensemble through the uncertainty of the dual observable and the weak uncertainty of the observable through the coherence of the ensemble. It is shown that this numerical characteristic is closely connected with the relative entropy of discord for the corresponding classical-quantum state.

State space distribution and dynamical flow for closed and open quantum systems

We present a general formalism for studying the effects of heterogeneity in open quantum systems. We develop this formalism in the state space of density operators, on which ensembles of quantum states can be conveniently represented by probability distributions. We describe how this representation reduces ambiguity in the definition of quantum ensembles by providing the ability to explicitly separate classical and quantum sources of probabilistic uncertainty. We then derive explicit equations of motion for state space distributions of both open and closed quantum systems and demonstrate that resulting dynamics take a fluid mechanical form analogous to a classical probability fluid on Hamiltonian phase space, thus enabling a straightforward quantum generalization of Liouville’s theorem. We illustrate the utility of our formalism by analyzing the dynamics of an open two-level system using the state-space formalism that is shown to be consistent with the derived analytical results.

Upper Bounds for the Holevo Information Quantity and Their Use

We present a family of easily computable upper bounds for the Holevo (information) quantity of an ensemble of quantum states depending on a reference state (as a free parameter). These upper bounds are obtained by combining probabilistic and metric characteristics of the ensemble. We show that an appropriate choice of the reference state gives tight upper bounds for the Holevo quantity which in many cases improve the estimates existing in the literature. We also present an upper bound for the Holevo quantity of a generalized ensemble of quantum states with finite average energy depending on the metric divergence of an ensemble. In the case of a multi-mode quantum oscillator, this upper bound is tight for large energy. Upper bounds for the Holevo capacity of finite-dimensional quantum channels depending on metric characteristics of the channel output are obtained.

Cavity-assisted atomic Raman memories beyond the bad cavity limit: Effect of four-wave mixing

Quantum memories can be used not only for the storage of quantum information, but also for substantial manipulation of ensembles of quantum states. Therefore, the speed of such manipulation and the ability to write and retrieve the signals of relatively short duration becomes important. Previously there have been considered the limits on efficiency of the cavity-enhanced atomic Raman memories for the signals whose duration is not much larger than the cavity field lifetime, that is, beyond the bad cavity limit. We investigate in this work the four-wave mixing noise that arises by the retrieval of the relatively short signals from the cavity-assisted memories, thus complementing recent considerations by other authors, who mainly concentrated on the limit of large cavity decay rate. The four-wave mixing noise is commonly recognized as an important factor, able to prevent achieving a high memories quality in a variety of the atomic, solid state etc. implementations. The side-band noise sources (with respect to the quantized signal, supported by the cavity) play important role in the four-wave mixing. We propose an approach that allows one to account for the side-band quantum noise sources of different physical origin in the cavity-assisted atomic memories using a unified theoretical framework, based on a two-band spectral filtering of the noise sources. We demonstrate that in such spectrally-selective memories the side-band atomic noise sources essentially contribute to the four-wave mixing noise of the retrieved signal on a par with the side-band quantized field entering the cavity.

Concatenation of Keys in Quantum Cryptography: How Quantum Entanglement “Penetrates to” Classical Devices

Quantum mechanics admits collective measurements that are related to the projection onto entangled states and allow one to retrieve more classical information from an ensemble of quantum states compared with individual measurements. In this relation, a fundamental question arises for key secrecy in quantum cryptography. Should the secrecy criterion be formulated with regard to all keys distributed both on previous and future quantum key distribution (QKD) sessions, or it suffices to guarantee key secrecy only in an individual QKD session? The study of this question is the subject of the present paper.

Communication Complexity of One-Shot Remote State Preparation

Quantum teleportation uses prior shared entanglement and classical communication to send an unknown quantum state from one party to another. Remote state preparation (RSP) is a similar distributed task in which the sender knows the entire classical description of the state to be sent. (This may also be viewed as the task of non-oblivious compression of a single sample from an ensemble of quantum states.) We study the communication complexity of approximate remote state preparation, in which the goal is to prepare an approximation of the desired quantum state. Jain [Quant. Inf. & Comp., 2006] showed that the worst-case communication complexity of approximate RSP can be bounded from above in terms of the maximum possible information in an encoding. He also showed that this quantity is a lower bound for communication complexity of (exact) remote state preparation. In this work, we tightly characterize the worst-case and average-case communication complexity of remote state preparation in terms of non-asymptotic information-theoretic quantities. We also show that the average-case communication complexity of RSP can be much smaller than the worst-case one. In the process, we show that n bits cannot be communicated with less than n transmitted bits in LOCC protocols. This strengthens a result due to Nayak and Salzman [J. ACM, 2006] and may be of independent interest.

Quantum coherence generating power, maximally abelian subalgebras, and Grassmannian geometry

We establish a direct connection between the power of a unitary map in d-dimensions (d < ∞) to generate quantum coherence and the geometry of the set Md of maximally abelian subalgebras (of the quantum system full operator algebra). This set can be seen as a topologically non-trivial subset of the Grassmannian over linear operators. The natural distance over the Grassmannian induces a metric structure on Md, which quantifies the lack of commutativity between the pairs of subalgebras. Given a maximally abelian subalgebra, one can define, on physical grounds, an associated measure of quantum coherence. We show that the average quantum coherence generated by a unitary map acting on a uniform ensemble of quantum states in the algebra (the so-called coherence generating power of the map) is proportional to the distance between a pair of maximally abelian subalgebras in Md connected by the unitary transformation itself. By embedding the Grassmannian into a projective space, one can pull-back the standard Fubini-Study metric on Md and define in this way novel geometrical measures of quantum coherence generating power. We also briefly discuss the associated differential metric structures.

Non-stationary and relaxation phenomena in cavity-assisted quantum memories

We investigate the non-stationary and relaxation phenomena in cavity-assisted quantum memories for light. As a storage medium we consider an ensemble of cold atoms with standard Lambda-scheme of working levels. Some theoretical aspects of the problem were treated previously by many authors, and recent experiments stimulate more deep insight into the ultimate ability and limitations of the device. Since quantum memories can be used not only for the storage of quantum information, but also for a substantial manipulation of ensembles of quantum states, the speed of such manipulation and hence the ability to write and retrieve the signals of relatively short duration becomes important. In our research we do not apply the so-called bad cavity limit, and consider the memory operation of the signals whose duration is not much larger than the cavity field lifetime, accounting also for the finite lifetime of atomic coherence. In our paper we present an effective approach that makes it possible to find the non-stationary amplitude and phase behavior of strong classical control field, that matches the desirable time profile of both the envelope and the phase of the retrieved quantized signal. The phase properties of the retrieved quantized signals are of importance for the detection and manipulation of squeezing, entanglement, etc by means of optical mixing and homodyning.

Tight uniform continuity bounds for the quantum conditional mutual information, for the Holevo quantity, and for capacities of quantum channels

We start with Fannes’ type and Winter’s type tight (uniform) continuity bounds for the quantum conditional mutual information and their specifications for states of special types. Then we analyse continuity of the Holevo quantity with respect to nonequivalent metrics on the set of discrete ensembles of quantum states. We show that the Holevo quantity is continuous on the set of all ensembles of m states with respect to all the metrics if either m or the dimension of underlying Hilbert space is finite and obtain Fannes’ type tight continuity bounds for the Holevo quantity in this case. In the general case, conditions for local continuity of the Holevo quantity for discrete and continuous ensembles are found. Winter’s type tight continuity bound for the Holevo quantity under constraint on the average energy of ensembles is obtained and applied to the system of quantum oscillators. The above results are used to obtain tight and close-to-tight continuity bounds for basic capacities of finite-dimensional channels (significantly refining the Leung-Smith continuity bounds).

Exponential decay of matrix Φ-entropies on Markov semigroups with applications to dynamical evolutions of quantum ensembles

In this work, we extend the theory of quantum Markov processes on a single quantum state to a broader theory that covers Markovian evolution of an ensemble of quantum states, which generalizes Lindblad’s formulation of quantum dynamical semigroups. Our results establish the equivalence between an exponential decrease of the matrix Φ-entropies and the Φ-Sobolev inequalities, which allows us to characterize the dynamical evolution of a quantum ensemble to its equilibrium. In particular, we study the convergence rates of two special semigroups, namely, the depolarizing channel and the phase-damping channel. In the former, since there exists a unique equilibrium state, we show that the matrix Φ-entropy of the resulting quantum ensemble decays exponentially as time goes on. Consequently, we obtain a stronger notion of monotonicity of the Holevo quantity—the Holevo quantity of the quantum ensemble decays exponentially in time and the convergence rate is determined by the modified log-Sobolev inequalities. However, in the latter, the matrix Φ-entropy of the quantum ensemble that undergoes the phase-damping Markovian evolution generally will not decay exponentially. There is no classical analogy for these different equilibrium situations. Finally, we also study a statistical mixing of Markov semigroups on matrix-valued functions. We can explicitly calculate the convergence rate of a Markovian jump process defined on Boolean hypercubes and provide upper bounds to the mixing time.

Approximate reversibility in the context of entropy gain, information gain, and complete positivity

There are several inequalities in physics which limit how well we can process physical systems to achieve some intended goal, including the second law of thermodynamics, entropy bounds in quantum information theory, and the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Recent results provide physically meaningful enhancements of these limiting statements, determining how well one can attempt to reverse an irreversible process. In this paper, we apply and extend these results to give strong enhancements to several entropy inequalities, having to do with entropy gain, information gain, entropic disturbance, and complete positivity of open quantum systems dynamics. Our first result is a remainder term for the entropy gain of a quantum channel. This result implies that a small increase in entropy under the action of a subunital channel is a witness to the fact that the channel's adjoint can be used as a recovery map to undo the action of the original channel. We apply this result to pure-loss, quantum-limited amplifier, and phase-insensitive quantum Gaussian channels, showing how a quantum-limited amplifier can serve as a recovery from a pure-loss channel and vice versa. Our second result regards the information gain of a quantum measurement, both without and with quantum side information. We find here that a small information gain implies that it is possible to undo the action of the original measurement if it is efficient. The result also has operational ramifications for the information-theoretic tasks known as measurement compression without and with quantum side information. Our third result shows that the loss of Holevo information caused by the action of a noisy channel on an input ensemble of quantum states is small if and only if the noise can be approximately corrected on average. We finally establish that the reduced dynamics of a system-environment interaction are approximately completely positive and trace preserving if and only if the data processing inequality holds approximately.