We provide a bound for the trace distance between two quantum states. The lower bound is based on the superfidelity, which provides the upper bound on quantum fidelity. One of the advantages of the presented bound is that it can be estimated using a simple measurement procedure. We also compare this bound with the one provided in terms of fidelity.
We provide a bound for the trace distance between two quantum states. The lower bound is based on the superfidelity, which provides the upper bound on quantum fidelity. One of the advantages of the presented bound is that it can be estimated using a simple measurement procedure. We also compare this bound with the one provided in terms of fidelity.
The measures of distances between points in a Hilbert space are one of the basic theoretical concepts used to characterize properties of a quantum system with respect to some etalon state. These are not only used in studying fidelity of signal transmission and basic quantum phenomena but also applied in measuring quantum correlations, and also in quantum machine learning. The values of quantum distance measures are very difficult to determine without completely reconstructing the state. Here we demonstrate an interferometric approach to measuring distances between quantum states that in some cases can outperform quantum state tomography. We propose a direct experimental method to estimate such distance measures between two unknown two-qubit mixed states such as Uhlmann-Jozsa fidelity (or the Bures distance), the Hilbert-Schmidt distance, and the trace distance. The fidelity is estimated via the measurement of the upper and lower bounds of the fidelity, which are referred to as the superfidelity and subfidelity, respectively. Our method is based on the multiparticle interactions (i.e., interference) between copies of the unknown pairs of qubits.
The quantum relative entropy is frequently used as a distance, or distinguishability measure between two quantum states. In this article we study the relation between this measure and a number of other measures used for that purpose, including the trace norm distance. More specifically, we derive lower and upper bounds on the relative entropy in terms of various distance measures for the difference of the states based on unitarily invariant norms. The upper bounds can be considered as statements of continuity of the relative entropy distance in the sense of Fannes. We employ methods from optimisation theory to obtain bounds that are as sharp as possible.
The quantum relative entropy is frequently used as a distance measure between two quantum states, and inequalities relating it to other distance measures are important mathematical tools in many areas of quantum information theory. We have derived many such inequalities in previous work. The present paper is a follow-up on this, and provides a sharp upper bound on the relative entropy in terms of the trace norm distance and of the smallest eigenvalues of both states concerned. The result obtained here is more general than the corresponding one from our previous work. As a corollary, we obtain a sharp upper bound on the regularised relative entropy introduced by Lendi, Farhadmotamed, and van Wonderen.
Abstract Upper bounds for the Bures distance as well as for the trace-norm distance between quantum Gaussian states of CCR in terms of the mean vectors and covariance matrices are obtained, basing on a fidelity-like quantity which we call the states overlap. We argue that these bounds are better adapted to the Bures distance and hence to the corresponding methods of state estimation. We also briefly recall our results concerning bounds for the states overlap for fermionic Gaussian states of CAR. The problems studied in this paper can be considered as a noncommutative analog of estimation of the Hellinger distance and the total variance distance between Gaussian probability distributions in the classical probability theory.
We investigate the computational complexity of estimating the operator norm distance T∞(ρ0,ρ1), defined via the operator norm ∥A∥∞=σmax(A), given poly(n)-size state-preparation circuits of n-qubit quantum states ρ0 and ρ1. We provide efficient quantum estimators for the operator norm distance whose complexity is independent of the rank (and thus the dimension) of the states:
1. When one state is pure, we establish an optimal quantum estimator using Θ(1/ε) queries to the state-preparation circuits. Consequently, for constant additive error, say ε=1/5, our estimator runs in poly(n) time. Since the operator norm distance T∞(∣ψ⟩⟨ψ∣,ρ) is exactly half of the trace distance T(∣ψ⟩⟨ψ∣,ρ), our result also gives rank-independent query complexity for estimating both quantities, whereas the approaches due to van Apeldoorn, Cornelissen, Gily{é}n, and Nannicini (SODA 2023) and Wang and Zhang (TIT 2024) have query complexity scaling at least linearly with rank(ρ), which can be exp(n) in general.
2. For general quantum states, we also provide a quantum estimator using O(1/ε3/2) queries to the state-preparation circuits, which shows that the corresponding promise problem is BQP-complete and improves the QMA upper bound sketched by Liu and Wang (ESA 2025). Together with an Ω(1/ε) quantum query complexity lower bound, this leaves only square-root room for improvement.
The key intuition behind our estimators is that, when one state is pure, the pure state ∣ψ⟩ has overlap at least 1/2 with the top unit eigenvector of ∣ψ⟩⟨ψ∣−ρ, reflecting a structural feature specific to the operator norm distance.