A unifying framework for identifying distance and holonomy for decompositions of density operators is introduced. Parallelity between quantum ensembles is defined by minimizing this distance over allowed decompositions. The minimum is a property of a pair of states and coincides with the Bures distance. The parallelity condition imposes a connection (rule for parallel transport) that results in the Uhlmann holonomy for sequences of density operators. A distance and holonomy for spectral decompositions of density operators is identified as a sub-group restriction of the full decomposition freedom. These spectral concepts are gauge invariant (decomposition independent) properties of mixed quantum ensembles, as long as the corresponding density operators are non-degenerate. A gauge invariant spectral geometric phase for discrete sequences of mixed quantum states is obtained as the phase of the trace of the spectral holonomy. This geometric phase differs from the interferometric mixed state geometric phase in the continuous limit.
This paper focuses on the geometric phase of general mixed states under unitary evolution. Here we analyze both non-degenerate as well as degenerate states. Starting with the non-degenerate case, we show that the usual procedure of subtracting the dynamical phase from the total phase to yield the geometric phase for pure states, does not hold for mixed states. To this end, we furnish an expression for the geometric phase that is gauge invariant. The parallelity conditions are shown to be easily derivable from this expression. We also extend our formalism to states that exhibit degeneracies. He…
We consider the problem of optimal asymptotically faithful compression for ensembles of mixed quantum states. Although the optimal rate is unknown, we prove upper and lower bounds and describe a series of illustrative examples of compression of mixed states. We also discuss a classical analogue of the problem.
We present one-shot compression protocols that optimally encode ensembles of $N$ identically prepared mixed states into $O(\log N)$ qubits. In contrast to the case of pure-state ensembles, we find that the number of encoding qubits drops down discontinuously as soon as a nonzero error is tolerated and the spectrum of the states is known with sufficient precision. For qubit ensembles, this feature leads to a 25% saving of memory space. Our compression protocols can be implemented efficiently on a quantum computer.
We provide a rate distortion interpretation of the problem of quantum data compression of ensembles of mixed states with commuting density operators. There are two versions of this problem. In the visible case the sequence of states is available to the encoder and in the blind or hidden case the encoder may access only a sequence of measurements. We find the exact optimal compression rates for both the visible and hidden cases. Our analysis includes the scenario in which asymptotic reconstruction is imperfect.
We consider the problem of compression of the quantum information carried by ensemble of mixed states. We prove that for arbitrary coding schemes the least number of qubits needed to convey the signal states asymptotically faithfully is bounded from below by the Holevo function $S(\varrho)-\sum_ip_iS(\varrho_i)$. We also show that a compression protocol can be composed with another one, provided that the latter offers perfect transmission. Such a compound protocol is applied to the case of binary source. It is conjectured to reach the obtained bound. Finally, we point out that in the case of m…
We study the quantum dynamics of a non-interacting spin ensemble under the effect of a reservoir by applying the framework of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian operators. Theoretically, the two-level model describes the quantum spin system and the Bloch vector to establish the dynamical evolution. Experimentally, phosphorous ($^{31}$P) nuclei with spin $I=1/2$ are used to represent the two-level system and the magnetization evolution is measured and used to compare with the theoretical prediction. At room temperature, the composite dynamics of the radio-frequency pulse plus field inhomogeneities (…
We present a formula that determines the optimal number of qubits per message that allows asymptotically faithful compression of the quantum information carried by an ensemble of mixed states. The set of mixed states determines a decomposition of the Hilbert space into the redundant part and the irreducible part. After removing the redundancy, the optimal compression rate is shown to be given by the von Neumann entropy of the reduced ensemble.
The optimal (pure state) ensemble length of a separable state, A, is the minimum number of (pure) product states needed in convex combination to construct A. We study the set of all separable states with optimal (pure state) ensemble length equal to k or fewer. Lower bounds on k are found below which these sets have measure 0 in the set of separable states. In the bipartite case and the multiparticle case where one of the particles has significantly more quantum numbers than the rest, the lower bound for non-pure state ensembles is sharp. A consequence of our results is that for all two partic…
We consider the problem of detecting the true quantum state among r possible ones, based on measurements performed on n of copies of a finite dimensional quantum system. It is known that the exponent for the rate of decrease of the averaged error probability cannot exceed the multiple quantum Chernoff bound (MQCB) defined as the worst case (smallest) quantum Chernoff distance between any possible pair of the r states. This error exponent is attainable for r pure states, but for the general case of mixed states only attainability up to a factor 1/3 is known. Here we show that the MQCB is attain…
A recent proposal for mixed dynamics of classical and quantum ensembles is shown, in contrast to other proposals, to satisfy the minimal algebraic requirements proposed by Salcedo for any consistent formulation of such dynamics. Generalised Ehrenfest relations for the expectation values of classical and quantum observables are also obtained. It is further shown that additional desirable requirements, related to separability, may be satisfied under the assumption that only the configuration of the classical component is directly accessible to measurement, eg, via a classical pointer. Although t…
We prove that it is possible to remotely prepare an ensemble of non-commuting mixed states using communication equal to the Holevo information for this ensemble. This remote preparation scheme may be used to convert between different ensembles of mixed states in an asymptotically lossless way, analogous to concentration and dilution for entanglement.
Entanglement of purification was introduced by Terhal et al. for characterizing the bound of the generation of correlated states from maximally entangled states with sublinear size of classical communication. On the other hand, M. Horodecki obtained the optimal compression rate with a mixed states ensemble in the visible setting. In this paper, we prove that the optimal visible compression rate for mixed states is equal to the limit of the regularized entanglement of purification of the state corresponding to the given ensemble. This result gives a new interpretation to the entanglement of pur…
Geometrical structures of quantum mechanics provide us with new insightful results about the nature of quantum theory. In this work we consider mixed quantum states represented by finite rank density operators. We review our geometrical framework that provide the space of density operators with Riemannian and symplectic structures, and we derive a geometric uncertainty relation for observables acting on mixed quantum states. We also give an example that visualizes the geometric uncertainty relation for spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles.
The minimum error discrimination problem for ensembles of linearly independent pure states are known to have an interesting structure; for such a given ensemble the optimal POVM is given by the pretty good measurment of another ensemble which can be related to the former ensemble by a bijective mapping $\mathscr{R}$ on the "space of ensembles". In this paper we generalize this result to ensembles of general linearly independent states (not necessarily pure) and also give an analytic expression for the inverse of the map, i.e., for $\mathscr{R}^{-1}$. In the process of proving this we also simp…
Two families of bipartite mixed quantum states are studied for which it is proved that the number of members in the optimal-decomposition ensemble --- the ensemble realizing the entanglement of formation --- is greater than the rank of the mixed state. We find examples for which the number of states in this optimal ensemble can be larger than the rank by an arbitrarily large factor. In one case the proof relies on the fact that the partial transpose of the mixed state has zero eigenvalues; in the other case the result arises from the properties of product bases that are completable only by emb…
The quantum nature of bulk ensemble NMR quantum computing --the center of recent heated debate, is addressed. Concepts of the mixed state and entanglement are examined, and the data in a 2 qubit liquid NMR quantum computation are analyzed. It is pointed out that the key problem in the current debate is the understanding of entanglement in a mixed state system. The following points are concluded in this Letter: 1)Density matrix describes the "state" of an average particle in an ensemble. It can not describe the state of an individual particle in an ensemble in detail; 2) Entanglement is a prope…
We analyze the operation of a novel sensor based on atom interferometry, which can achieve supra-classical sensitivity by exploiting quantum correlations in mixed states of many qubits. The interferometer is based on quantum gates which use coherently-controlled Rydberg interactions between a single atom (which acts as a control qubit) and an atomic ensemble (which provides register qubits). In principle, our scheme can achieve precision scaling with the size of the ensemble - which can extend to large numbers of atoms - while using only single-qubit operations on the control and bulk operatio…
We present a general method for constructing pure-product-state representations for density operators of $N$ quantum bits. If such a representation has nonnegative expansion coefficients, it provides an explicit separable ensemble for the density operator. We derive the condition for separability of a mixture of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state with the maximally mixed state.
The question of the generation of random mixed states is discussed, aiming for the computation of probabilistic characteristics of composite finite dimensional quantum systems. Particularly, we consider the generation of the random Hilbert-Schmidt and Bures ensembles of qubit and qutrit pairs and compute the corresponding probabilities to find a separable state among the states of a fixed rank.
For a mixed quantum state with density matrix $ρ$ there are infinitely many ensembles of pure quantum states, which average to $ρ$. Starting from Laplace principle of insufficient reason (not to give \emph{a priori} preference to any particular state), we derive a `natural' distribution of pure states averaging to $ρ$, which is `more spread' than all the others.
Interaction with environment may lead to the transition of quantum system from pure state to the mixed one. In this case, the problem of definition of entanglement may arise. In particular, quantitative measure of entanglement concurrence is introduced differently for pure and mixed states. To solve this problem, alternative definition of concurrence of mixed states is introduced in present work. In particular, concurrence of mixed states is determined as an average of pure states concurrences. Averaging is carried out over the quantum ensemble, corresponding to all possible realization of ran…
We consider the problem of designing a measurement to minimize the probability of a detection error when distinguishing between a collection of possibly non-orthogonal mixed quantum states. We show that if the quantum state ensemble consists of linearly independent density operators then the optimal measurement is an orthogonal Von Neumann measurement consisting of mutually orthogonal projection operators and not a more general positive operator-valued measure.
We present a theoretical study of the impact of an electrostatic field combined with nonresonant linearly polarized laser pulses on the rotational dynamics of a thermal ensemble of linear molecules. We solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation within the rigid rotor approximation for several rotational states. Using the carbonyl sulfide (OCS) molecule as a prototype, the mixed-field orientation of a thermal sample is analyzed in detail for experimentally accessible static field strengths and laser pulses. We demonstrate that for the characteristic field configuration used in current mixed-…
A geometrical characterization of robustly separable (that is, remaining separable under sufficiently small variiations) mixed states of a bipartite quantum system is given. It is shown that the density matrix of any such state can be represented as a normal vector to a hypersurface in the Euclidean space of all self-adjoint operators in the state space of the whole system. The expression for this hypersurface is provided.
We consider the problem of estimating the state of a large but finite number $N$ of identical quantum systems. In the limit of large $N$ the problem simplifies. In particular the only relevant measure of the quality of the estimation is the mean quadratic error matrix. Here we present a bound on the mean quadratic error which is a new quantum version of the Cramér-Rao inequality. This new bound expresses in a succinct way how in the quantum case one can trade information about one parameter for information about another parameter. The bound holds for arbitrary measurements on pure states, but …
A quantum ensemble $\{(p_x, ρ_x)\}$ is a set of quantum states each occurring randomly with a given probability. Quantum ensembles are necessary to describe situations with incomplete a priori information, such as the output of a stochastic quantum channel (generalized measurement), and play a central role in quantum communication. In this paper, we propose measures of distance and fidelity between two quantum ensembles. We consider two approaches: the first one is based on the ability to mimic one ensemble given the other one as a resource and is closely related to the Monge-Kantorovich optim…
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.
We propose a parallel quantum computing mode for ensemble quantum computer. In this mode, some qubits can be in pure states while other qubits in mixed states. It enables a single ensemble quantum computer to perform $"$single-instruction-multi-data" type of parallel computation. In Grover's algorithm and Shor's algorithm, parallel quantum computing can provide additional speedup. In addition, it also makes a fuller use of qubit resources in an ensemble quantum computer. As a result, some qubits discarded in the preparation of an effective pure state in the Schulman-Varizani, and the Cleve-DiV…
In [1] Zhu and Rabitz presented a rapidly convergent iterative algorithm for optimal control of the expectation value of a positive definite observable in a pure-state quantum system. In this paper we generalize this algorithm to a quantum statistical mechanics setting and show that it is both efficient in the mixed-state case and effective in achieving the control objective of maximizing the ensemble average of arbitrary observables in the cases studied.
It is shown that local distinguishability of orthogonal mixed states can be completely characterized by local distinguishability of their supports irrespective of entanglement and mixedness of the states. This leads to two kinds of upper bounds on the number of perfect LOCC distinguishable orthogonal mixed states. The first one depends only on pure-state entanglement within the supports of the states, and therefore may be easy to compute in many instances. The second bound is optimal in the sense that it optimizes the bounding quantities, not necessarily function of entanglement alone, over al…
The entropy of the Gram matrix of a joint purification of an ensemble of K mixed states yields an upper bound for the Holevo information Chi of the ensemble. In this work we combine geometrical and probabilistic aspects of the ensemble in order to obtain useful bounds for Chi. This is done by constructing various correlation matrices involving fidelities between every pair of states from the ensemble. For K=3 quantum states we design a matrix of root fidelities that is positive and the entropy of which is conjectured to upper bound Chi. Slightly weaker bounds are established for arbitrary ense…
The von Neumann entropy and the subentropy of a mixed quantum state are upper and lower bounds, respectively, on the accessible information of any ensemble consistent with the given mixed state. Here we define and investigate a set of quantities intermediate between entropy and subentropy.
Generalizing the notion of relative entropy, the difference between a priori and a posteriori relative entropy for quantum systems is drawn. The former, known as quantum relative entropy, is associated with quantum states recognition. The latter -- a posteriori relative quantum entropy is shown to be related with state reconstruction due to the following property: given a density operator $ρ$, ensembles of pure states with Gibbs distribution with respect to the defined distance are proved to represent the initial state $ρ$ up to an amount of white noise (completely mixed state) which can be ma…
In astrophysical environments, neutrinos may propagate over a long distance in a magnetic field. In the presence of a rotating magentic field, the neutrino spin can flip from left-handed neutrino to right-handed neutrino. Smirnov demonstrated that the pure state geometric phase due to the neutrino spin precession may cause resonantg spin conversion inside the Sun. However, in general, the neutrinos may in an ensemble of thermal state. In this article, the corresponding mixed state geometric phases will be formulated, including the off-diagonal casse and diagonal ones. The spefic features towar…
We generalize the concept of topological invariants for mixed states based on the ensemble geometric phase (EGP) introduced for one-dimensional lattice models to two dimensions. In contrast to the geometric phase for density matrices suggested by Uhlmann, the EGP leads a proper Chern number for Gaussian, finite-temperature or non-equilibrium steady states. The Chern number can be expressed as an integral of the Berry curvature of the so-called fictitious Hamiltonian, constructed from single-particle correlations, over the two-dimensional Brillouin zone. For the Chern number to be non-zero the …
For an isolated generic quantum system out of equilibrium, the long time average of observables is given by the diagonal ensemble, i.e. the mixed state with the same probability for energy eigenstates as the initial state but without coherences between different energies. In this work we present a method to approximate the diagonal ensemble using tensor networks. Instead of simulating the real time evolution, we adapt a filtering scheme introduced earlier in [Phys. Rev. B 101, 144305 (2020)] to this problem. We analyze the performance of the method on a non-integrable spin chain, for which we …
Atomic ensembles are effective memory nodes for quantum communication network due to the long coherence time and the collective enhancement effect for the nonlinear interaction between an ensemble and a photon. Here we investigate the possibility of achieving the entanglement distillation for nonlocal atomic ensembles by the input-output process of a single photon as a result of cavity quantum electrodynamics. We give an optimal entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for two-atomic-ensemble systems in a partially entangled pure state with known parameters and an efficient ECP for the system…
A basic property of distinguishability is that it is non-increasing under further quantum operations. Following this, we generalize two measures of distinguishability of pure states--fidelity and von Neumann entropy, to mixed states as self-consistent measures. Then we extend these two measures to quantum operations. The information-theoretic point of the generalized Holevo quantity of an ensemble of quantum operations is constructed. Preferably it is an additive measure. The exact formula for SU(2) ensemble is presented. With the aid of the formula, we show Jozsa-Schlienz paradox that states …
Characterization of the multipartite mixed state entanglement is still a challenging problem. Since due to the fact that the entanglement for the mixed states, in general, is defined by a convex-roof extension. That is the entanglement measure of a mixed state \r{ho} of a quantum system can be defined as the minimum average entanglement of an ensemble of pure states. In this Letter, we give an explicit formula for the polynomial entanglement measures of degree 2 of even-N qubits mixed states that is similar to Wooters formula in [1]. Then we discuss our findings in the framework of X density m…
In this paper, we consider the problem of unambiguous discrimination between a set of mixed quantum states. We first divide the density matrix of each mixed state into two parts by the fact that it comes from ensemble of pure quantum states. The first part will not contribute anything to the discrimination, the second part has support space linearly independent to each other. Then the problem we consider can be reduced to a problem in which the strategy of set discrimination can be used in designing measurements to discriminate mixed states unambiguously. We find a necessary and sufficient con…
When an optimal measurement is made on a qubit and what we call an Unbiased Mixture of the resulting ensembles is taken, then the post measurement density matrix is shown to be related to the pre-measurement density matrix through a simple and linear relation. It is shown that such a relation holds only when the measurements are made in Mutually Unbiased Bases- MUB. For Spin-1/2 it is also shown explicitly that non-orthogonal measurements fail to give such a linear relation no matter how the ensembles are mixed. The result has been proved to be true for arbitrary quantum mechanical systems of …
General statistical ensembles in the Hamiltonian formulation of hybrid quantum-classical systems are analyzed. It is argued that arbitrary probability densities on the hybrid phase space must be considered as the class of possible physically distinguishable statistical ensembles of hybrid systems. Nevertheless, statistical operators associated with the hybrid system and with the quantum subsystem can be consistently defined. Dynamical equations for the statistical operators representing the mixed states of the hybrid system and its quantum subsystem are derived and analyzed. In particular, the…
In [J. Chem. Phys. 143, 054102 (2015)] I have derived conditions to characterize the kernel of the retarded response function, under the assumption that the initial state is a ground state. In this article I demonstrate its generalization to mixed states (ensembles). To make the proof work, the weights in the ensemble need to be decreasing for increasing energies of the pure states from which the mixed state is constructed. The resulting conditions are not easy to verify, but under the additional assumptions that the ensemble weights are directly related to the energies and that the full spect…
Quantum error correction for an unresolvable spin ensemble
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Centre of Excellence in Quantum Information, Computation, Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校量子信息、计算、科学与技术卓越中心）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）
It is standard to assume that the Wigner distribution of a mixed quantum state consisting of square-integrable functions is a quasi-probability distribution, that is that its integral is one and that the marginal properties are satisfied. However this is in general not true. We introduce a class of quantum states for which this property is satisfied, these states are dubbed "Feichtinger states" because they are defined in terms of a class of functional spaces (modulation spaces) introduced in the 1980's by H. Feichtinger. The properties of these states are studied, which gives us the opportuni…
We consider an experiment in which quantum tomography data is collected before and after an entangling measurement performed on two independently prepared, maximally-mixed ensembles. We show that each sub-ensemble that is, as expected, entangled after the measurement is also entangled before it. We call the latter pre-entanglement. If individual systems possessed quantum states, their independent preparations would mean the sub-ensembles were in separable states prior to the entanglement event. The contradiction can be resolved by assigning states only to ensembles and not individual quantum s…
Quantum dynamical simulations of statistical ensembles pose a significant computational challenge due to the fact that mixed states need to be represented. If the underlying dynamics is fully unitary, for example in ultrafast coherent control at finite temperatures, one approach to approximate time-dependent observables is to sample the density operator by solving the Schrödinger equation for a set of wave functions with randomized phases. We show that, on average, random-phase wave functions perform well for ensembles with high mixedness, whereas at higher purities a deterministic sampling of…
We analyze several product measures in the space of mixed quantum states. In particular we study measures induced by the operation of partial tracing. The natural, rotationally invariant measure on the set of all pure states of a N x K composite system, induces a unique measure in the space of N x N mixed states (or in the space of K x K mixed states, if the reduction takes place with respect to the first subsystem). For K=N the induced measure is equal to the Hilbert-Schmidt measure, which is shown to coincide with the measure induced by singular values of non-Hermitian random Gaussian matric…
Coherent errors in quantum operations are ubiquitous. Whether arising from spurious environmental couplings or errors in control fields, such errors can accumulate rapidly and degrade the performance of a quantum circuit significantly more than an average gate fidelity may indicate. As Hastings [1] and Campbell [2] have recently shown, by replacing the deterministic implementation of a quantum gate with a randomized ensemble of implementations, on can dramatically suppress coherent errors. Our work begins by reformulating the results of Hastings and Campbell as a quantum optimal control proble…
We show that a mixed state $ρ=\sum_{mn}a_{mn}|m> < n|$ can be realized by an ensemble of pure states $\{p_{k}, |ϕ_{k} > \}$ where $|ϕ_{k}>=\sum_{m}\sqrt{a_{mm}}e^{iθ_{m}^{k}}|m>$. Employing this form, we discuss the relative entropy of entanglement of Schmidt correlated states. Also, we calculate the distillable entanglement of a class of mixed states.
We highlight an information-theoretic meaning of quantum discord as the gap between the ac- cessible information and the Holevo bound in the framework of ensemble of quantum states. This complementary relationship implies that a large amount of pre-existing arguments about the evaluation of quantum discord can be directly applied to the accessible information and vice versa. For an ensemble of two pure qubit states, we show that one can evade the optimization problem with the help of the Koashi-Winter relation. Further, for the general case (two mixed qubit states), we recover the main results…
Wishart ensemble is a useful and important random matrix model used in diverse fields. By realizing induced random mixed quantum states as Wishart ensemble with the fixed-trace one, using matrix integral technique we give a fast track to the average coherence for random mixed quantum states induced via partial-tracing of the Haar-distributed bipartite pure states. As a direct consequence of this result, we get a compact formula of the average subentropy of random mixed states. These obtained compact formulae extend our previous work.
