We give a mathematical framework for manipulating indeterminate-length quantum bit strings. In particular, we define prefixes, fragments, tensor products and concatenation of such strings of qubits, and study their properties and relationships.
The results are then used to define prefix-free Hilbert spaces in a more general way than in previous work, without assuming the existence of a basis of length eigenstates. We prove a quantum analogue of the Kraft inequality, illustrate the results with some examples and discuss the relevance of prefix-free Hilbert spaces for lossless compression.
We describe a method for lossless quantum compression if the output of the information source is not known. We compute the best possible compression rate, minimizing the expected base length of the output quantum bit string (the base length of a quantum string is the maximal length in the superposition). This complements work by Schumacher and Westmoreland who calculated the corresponding rate for minimizing the output's average length. Our compressed code words are prefix-free indeterminate-length quantum bit strings which can be concatenated in the case of multiple sources. Therefore, we gen…
Quantum computing is greatly advanced in recent years and is expected to transform the computation paradigm in the near future. Quantum circuit simulation plays a key role in the toolchain for the development of quantum hardware and software systems. However, due to the enormous Hilbert space of quantum states, simulating quantum circuits with classical computers is extremely challenging despite notable efforts have been made. In this paper, we enhance quantum circuit simulation in two dimensions: accuracy and scalability. The former is achieved by using an algebraic representation of complex …
We begin by investigating relationships between two forms of Hilbert-Schmidt two-re[al]bit and two-qubit "separability functions"--those recently advanced by Lovas and Andai (J. Phys. A 50 [2017] 295303), and those earlier presented by Slater (J. Phys. A 40 [2007] 14279). In the Lovas-Andai framework, the independent variable $\varepsilon \in [0,1]$ is the ratio $σ(V)$ of the singular values of the $2 \times 2$ matrix $V=D_2^{1/2} D_1^{-1/2}$ formed from the two $2 \times 2$ diagonal blocks ($D_1, D_2$) of a $4 \times 4$ density matrix $D$. In the Slater setting, the independent variable $μ$ i…
In quant-ph/0303042, Poulin, Laflamme, Milburn and Paz consider the problem of distinguishing quantum chaos from quantum integrability for dynamics in an $N$-dimensional Hilbert space. They claim that this can be done by deterministic quantum computing with a single bit using $O(\sqrt{N})$ physical resources, compared to O(N) physical resources classically. I point out what seems to be a fatal flaw with their proposal.
The unitary group acting on the Hilbert space of three quantum bits admits a Lie subgroup, of elements which permute with the symmetric group of permutations. Under the action of such Lie subgroup, the Hilbert space splits into three invariant subspaces of dimensions 4, 2 and 2 respectively, each corresponding to an irreducible representation of su(2). The subspace of dimension 4 is uniquely determined and corresponds to states that are themselves invariant under the action of the symmetric group. This is the so called symmetric sector. We provide an analysis of pure states in the symmetric se…
The One-time-pad (OTP) was mathematically proven to be perfectly secure by Shannon in 1949. We propose to extend the classical OTP from an n-bit finite field to the entire symmetric group over the finite field. Within this context the symmetric group can be represented by a discrete Hilbert sphere (DHS) over an n-bit computational basis. Unlike the continuous Hilbert space defined over a complex field in quantum computing, a DHS is defined over the finite field GF(2). Within this DHS, the entire symmetric group can be completely described by the complete set of n-bit binary permutation matrice…
We propose the use of Rydberg interactions and ensembles of cold atoms in mixed state for the implementation of a protocol for deterministic quantum computation with one quantum bit (DQC1) that can be readily operated in high dimensional Hilbert spaces. We propose an experimental test for the scalability of the protocol and to study the physics of discord. Furthermore we develop a scheme to add control to non-trivial unitaries that will enable the study of many-body physics with ensembles in mixed states.
Ranking bit patterns -- finding the index of a given pattern in an ordered sequence -- is a major bottleneck scaling up numerical quantum many-body calculations, as fermionic and hard-core bosonic states translate naturally to bit patterns. Traditionally, ranking is done by bisectioning search, which has poor cache performance on modern machines. We instead propose to use tries (prefix trees), thereby achieving a two- to ten-fold speed-up in numerical experiments with only moderate memory overhead. For the important problem of ranking permutations, the corresponding tries can be compressed. Th…
An $n$-bit string is encoded as a sequence of non-orthogonal quantum states. The parity bit of that $n$-bit string is described by one of two density matrices, $ρ_0^{(n)}$ and $ρ_1^{(n)}$, both in a Hilbert space of dimension $2^n$. In order to derive the parity bit the receiver must distinguish between the two density matrices, e.g., in terms of optimal mutual information. In this paper we find the measurement which provides the optimal mutual information about the parity bit and calculate that information. We prove that this information decreases exponentially with the length of the string i…
We show that deterministic quantum computing with a single bit (DQC1) can determine whether the classical limit of a quantum system is chaotic or integrable using O(N) physical resources, where $N$ is the dimension of the Hilbert space of the system under study. This is a square root improvement over all known classical procedures. Our study relies strictly on the random matrix conjecture. We also present numerical results for the nonlinear kicked top.
Recently, Chau introduced an experimentally feasible qudit-based quantum-key-distribution (QKD) scheme. In that scheme, one bit of information is phase encoded in the prepared state in a $2^n$-dimensional Hilbert space in the form $(|i\rangle\pm|j\rangle)/\sqrt{2}$ with $n\ge 2$. For each qudit prepared and measured in the same two-dimensional Hilbert subspace, one bit of raw secret key is obtained in the absence of transmission error. Here we show that by modifying the basis announcement procedure, the same experimental setup can generate $n$ bits of raw key for each qudit prepared and measur…
By taking the need for quantum reference frames into account, it is shown that Hilbert-space factorization is a dissipative process requiring on the order of kT to reduce by one bit an observer's uncertainty in the provenance of a classically-recorded observational outcome. This cost is neglected in standard treatments of decoherence that assume that observational outcomes are obtained by interacting with a collection of degrees of freedom identified a priori. Treating this cost explicitly leads to a natural measure of the probability of any particular quantum reference frame.
Quantum information is radically different from classical information in that the quantum formalism (Hilbert space) makes necessary the introduction of irreducible ``nits,'' n being an arbitrary natural number (bigger than one), not just bits.
A quantum copying machine producing two (in general non-identical) copies of an arbitrary input state of a two-dimensional Hilbert space (qubit) is studied using a quality measure based on distinguishability of states, rather than fidelity. The problem of producing optimal copies is investigated with the help of a Bloch sphere representation, and shown to have a well-defined solution, including cases in which the two copies have unequal quality, or the quality depends upon the input state (is ``anisotropic'' in Bloch sphere language), or both. A simple quantum circuit yields the optimal copyin…
All known qudit-based prepare-and-measure quantum key distribution (PM-QKD) schemes are more error resilient than their qubit-based counterparts. Their high error resiliency comes partly from the careful encoding of multiple bits of signals used to generate the raw key in each transmitted qudit so that the same eavesdropping attempt causes a higher bit error rate (BER) in the raw key. Here I show that highly error-tolerant PM-QKD schemes can be constructed simply by encoding one bit of classical information in each transmitted qudit in the form $(|i\rangle\pm|j\rangle)/\sqrt{2}$, where $|i\ran…
In this paper, we consider the secret-string-learning problem in the teacher-student setting: the teacher has a secret string $s\in {\{0,1\}^{n}}$, and the student wants to learn the secret $s$ by question-answer interactions with the teacher, where at each time, the student can ask the teacher with a pair $(x, q) \in {\{0,1\}^{n}}\times\{0,1,\cdots, n-1\}$ and the teacher returns a bit given by the oracle $f_{s}(x,q)$ that indicates whether the length of the longest common prefix of $s$ and $x$ is greater than $q$ or not. Our contributions are as follows. (i) We prove that any classical deter…
Quantum information is defined by applying the concepts of ordinary (Shannon) information theory to a quantum sample space consisting of a single framework or consistent family. A classical analogy for a spin-half particle and other arguments show that the infinite amount of information needed to specify a precise vector in its Hilbert space is not a measure of the information carried by a quantum entity with a $d$-dimensional Hilbert space; the latter is, instead, bounded by log d bits (1 bit per qubit). The two bits of information transmitted in dense coding are located not in one but in the…
A conceptual difficulty in the foundations of quantum mechanics is the quantum measurement problem (QMP), essentially concerned with the apparent non-unitarity of the measurement process and the classicality of macroscopic systems. In an information theoretic approach proposed by us earlier (Quantum Information Processing 2, 153, 2003), which we clarify and elaborate here, QMP is understood to signal a fundamental finite resolution of quantum states, or, equivalently, a discreteness of Hilbert space. This was motivated by the notion that physical reality is a manifestation of information store…