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arXiv:0801.3393 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Entanglement and the quantum brachistochrone problem

Antoni Borràs, Claudia Zander, Angel Ricardo Plastino, M. Casas, Angel Ricardo Plastino

Published Dec 31, 2007• 33 citations
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Abstract

Entanglement is closely related to some fundamental features of the dynamics of composite quantum systems: quantum entanglement enhances the "speed" of evolution of certain quantum states, as measured by the time required to reach an orthogonal state. The concept of "speed" of quantum evolution constitutes an important ingredient in any attempt to determine the fundamental limits that basic physical laws impose on how fast a physical system can process or transmit information. Here we explore the relationship between entanglement and the speed of quantum evolution in the context of the quantum brachistochrone problem. Given an initial and a final state of a composite system we consider the amount of entanglement associated with the brachistochrone evolution between those states, showing that entanglement is an essential resource to achieve the alluded time-optimal quantum evolution.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/81/30007

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Entanglement is closely related to some fundamental features of the dynamics of composite quantum systems: quantum entanglement enhances the "speed" of evolution of certain quantum states, as measured by the time required to reach an orthogonal state. The concept of "speed" of quantum evolution constitutes an important ingredient in any attempt to determine the fundamental limits that basic physical laws impose on how fast a physical system can process or transmit information. Here we explore the relationship between entanglement and the speed of quantum evolution in the context of the quantum brachistochrone problem. Given an initial and a final state of a composite system we consider the amount of entanglement associated with the brachistochrone evolution between those states, showing that entanglement is an essential resource to achieve the alluded time-optimal quantum evolution.
It has been recently pointed out [V. Giovannetti, S. Lloyd, and L. Maccone, Europhys. Lett. 62, 615 (2003)] that, for certain classes of states, quantum entanglement enhances the ``speed'' of evolution of composite quantum systems, as measured by the time a given initial state requires to evolve to an orthogonal state. We provide here a systematic study of this effect for pure states of bipartite systems of low dimensionality, considering both distinguishable (two-qubits) subsystems, and systems constituted of two indistinguishable particles.
There exists an interesting relationship between entanglement and the time evolution of composite quantum systems: quantum entanglement enhances the 'speed' of evolution of certain quantum states, as measured by the time needed to reach an orthogonal state. Previous research done on this subject has been focused upon comparing extreme cases (highly entangled states versus separable states) or upon bi-partite systems. In the present contribution we explore the aforementioned connection (between entanglement and time evolution) in the cases of two-qubits and N -qubits systems, taking into account states of intermediate entanglement. In particular, we investigate a family of energetically symmetric states of low entanglement that saturate the quantum speed bound. We show that, as the number of qubits increases, very little entanglement is needed to reach the quantum speed limit.
The time needed by a quantum system to reach a state fully distinguishable from the original one provides a natural way of determining how fast the corresponding dynamical evolution is. This orthogonality time admits a lower bound, expressible in terms of the energy's expectation value and the energy's standard deviation, that yields a 'quantum speed limit'. Composite quantum systems need entanglement in order to achieve this limit. So far, most studies on the connection between entanglement and the quantum speed limit have focused on the case of non-interacting systems. The connection between quantum speed and entanglement is systematically investigated here for the case of a system of two interacting qubits, taking into consideration all possible initial states that evolve into an orthogonal one.
Abstract We analytically investigate the role of entanglement in time-optimal state evolution as an application of the quantum brachistochrone, a general method for obtaining the optimal time-dependent Hamiltonian for reaching a target quantum state. As a model, we treat two qubits indirectly coupled through an intermediate qubit that is directly controllable, which represents a typical situation in quantum information processing. We find the time-optimal unitary evolution law and quantify residual entanglement by the two-tangle between the indirectly coupled qubits, for all possible sets of initial pure quantum states of a tripartite system. The integrals of the motion of the brachistochrone are determined by fixing the minimal time at which the residual entanglement is maximized. Entanglement plays a role for W and Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger ( GHz ) initial quantum states, and for the bi-separable initial state in which the indirectly coupled qubits have a nonzero value of the 2-tangle.
There is a lower bound for the 'speed' of quantum evolution as measured by the time needed to reach an orthogonal state. We show that, for two-qubits systems, states saturating the quantum speed limit tend to exhibit a small amount of local evolution, as measured by the fidelity between the initial and final single qubit states after the time τ required by the composite system to reach an orthogonal state. Consequently, a trade-off between the speed of global evolution and the amount of local evolution seems to be at work.
The concept of quantum speed limit-time (QSL) was initially introduced as a lower bound to the time interval that a given initial state ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{I}$ may need so as to evolve into a state orthogonal to itself. Recently [V. Giovanetti, S. Lloyd, and L. Maccone, Phys. Rev. A 67, 052109 (2003)] this bound has been generalized to the case where ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{I}$ does not necessarily evolve into an orthogonal state, but into any other ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{F}$. It was pointed out that, for certain classes of states, quantum entanglement enhances the evolution ``speed'' of composite quantum systems. In this work we provide an exhaustive and systematic QSL study for pure and mixed states belonging to the whole 15-dimensional space of two qubits, with ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{F}$ a not necessarily orthogonal state to ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{I}$. We display convincing evidence for a clear correlation between concurrence, on the one hand, and the speed of quantum evolution determined by the action of a rather general local Hamiltonian, on the other one.