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arXiv:1801.01072 · IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)

Randomized Linear Algebra Approaches to Estimate the Von Neumann Entropy of Density Matrices

Eugenia-Maria Kontopoulou, Gregory Dexter, Wojciech Szpankowski A, Ananth Y. Grama, Petros Drineas B

Published Jun 1, 2018• 15 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

, named after John von Neumann, is an extension of the classical concept of entropy to the field of quantum mechanics. From a numerical perspective, von Neumann entropy can be computed simply by computing all eigenvalues of a density matrix, an operation that could be prohibitively expensive for large-scale density matrices. We present and analyze three randomized algorithms to approximate von Neumann entropy of real density matrices: our algorithms leverage recent developments in the Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (RandNLA) literature, such as randomized trace estimators, provable bounds for the power method, and the use of random projections to approximate the eigenvalues of a matrix. All three algorithms come with provable accuracy guarantees and our experimental evaluations support our theoretical findings showing considerable speedup with small loss in accuracy.

DOI
10.1109/isit.2018.8437723

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, named after John von Neumann, is an extension of the classical concept of entropy to the field of quantum mechanics. From a numerical perspective, von Neumann entropy can be computed simply by computing all eigenvalues of a density matrix, an operation that could be prohibitively expensive for large-scale density matrices. We present and analyze three randomized algorithms to approximate von Neumann entropy of real density matrices: our algorithms leverage recent developments in the Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (RandNLA) literature, such as randomized trace estimators, provable bounds for the power method, and the use of random projections to approximate the eigenvalues of a matrix. All three algorithms come with provable accuracy guarantees and our experimental evaluations support our theoretical findings showing considerable speedup with small loss in accuracy.
Entropy is a fundamental property of both classical and quantum systems, spanning myriad theoretical and practical applications in physics and computer science. We study the problem of obtaining estimates to within a multiplicative factor γ>1γ>1γ>1 of the Shannon entropy of probability distributions and the von Neumann entropy of mixed quantum states. Our main results are: ∙\quad\bullet∙ an O~(n1+η2γ2)\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\left( n^{\frac{1+η}{2γ^2}}\right)O(n2γ21+η​)-query quantum algorithm that outputs a γγγ-multiplicative approximation of the Shannon entropy H(p)H(\mathbf{p})H(p) of a classical probability distribution p=(p1,…,pn)\mathbf{p} = (p_1,\ldots,p_n)p=(p1​,…,pn​); ∙\quad\bullet∙ an O~(n12+1+η2γ2)\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}\left( n^{\frac12+\frac{1+η}{2γ^2}}\right)O(n21​+2γ21+η​)-query quantum algorithm that outputs a γγγ-multiplicative approximation of the von Neumann entropy S(ρ)S(ρ)S(ρ) of a density matrix ρ∈Cn×nρ\in\mathbb{C}^{n\times n}ρ∈Cn×n. In both cases, the input is assumed to have entropy bounded away from zero by a quantity determined by the parameter η>0η>0η>0, since, as we prove, no polynomial query algorithm can multiplicatively approximate the entropy of distributions with arbitrarily low entropy. In addition, we provide Ω(n13γ2)Ω\left(n^{\frac{1}{3γ^2}}\right)Ω(n3γ21​) lower bounds on the query complexity of γγγ-multiplicative estimation of Shannon and von Neumann entropies. We work with the quantum purified query access model, which can handle both classical probability distributions and mixed quantum states, and is the most general input model considered in the literature.
We propose a series of quantum algorithms for computing a wide range of quantum entropies and distances, including the von Neumann entropy, quantum Rényi entropy, trace distance, and fidelity. The proposed algorithms significantly outperform the prior best (and even quantum) ones in the low-rank case, some of which achieve exponential speedups. In particular, forN-dimensional quantum states of rankr, our proposed quantum algorithms for computing the von Neumann entropy, trace distance and fidelity within additive error ε have time complexity of Õ(r/ε2), Õ(r5/ε6) and Õ(r6.5/ε7.5), respectively. By contrast, prior quantum algorithms for the von Neumann entropy and trace distance usually have time complexity Ω(N), and the prior best one for fidelity has time complexity Õ(r12.5/ε13.5). The key idea of our quantum algorithms is to extend block-encoding from unitary operators in previous work to quantum states (i.e., density operators). It is realized by developing several convenient techniques to manipulate quantum states and extract information from them. The advantage of our techniques over the existing methods is that no restrictions on density operators are required; in sharp contrast, the previous methods usually require a lower bound on the minimal non-zero eigenvalue of density operators.
Von Neumann defined the informational entropy of a density matrix ρ by the expression S(ρ)=−tr(ρ ln ρ). [J. Von Neumann, Die Mathematischen Grundlagen der Quantummechanik (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1932)]. Here, starting from the definitions of Shannon entropy and of Renyi entropy of random variables, and using some (reasonable) rules of inference, two expressions are obtained for the quantum entropy of a given square (deterministic) matrix, irrespective of any probabilistic framework and/or any randomization technique. These definitions apply directly to linear operators on Hilbert spaces even when they are not of positive trace class, and they contain Von Neumann entropy as a special case. These new measures of uncertainty could provide new approaches to some problems related to structure complexity.
The notion of entropy was introduced by Clausius in order to discuss the thermal behavior of physical systems. After the work of Clausius, Boltzmann, Gibbs and others, the beginning of the exact treatment of entropy was due to von Neumann and Shannon. Their starting point was very di erent, von Neumann was motivated by quantum mechanics and Shannon founded communication theory. The entropy of a state describing a physical system is a quantity expressing the uncertainty or randomness of the system. Shannon regarded this uncertainty attached to a physical system as the amount of information carried by the system, so that the entropy of a state can be read as the information carried by the state. His idea comes from the following consideration: If a physical system has a large uncertainty and one receives information on the system by some procedure, then the so obtained information is more valuable than that received from a system having less uncertainty. It is understood in probability theory that the notion of (Shannon or measure theoretic) entropy has successful applications in a variety of subjects because it determines the asymptotic behavior of certain probabilities in the course of independent trials. First we will discuss this phenomena for nite quantum systems. By a nite quantum system we mean an algebra of matrices which is stable under taking adjoint. (In other words, a nite quantum system is a nite dimensional C*algebra.) If A is such an algebra then there is a linear functional Tr which takes the value 1 at each minimal projection. It is "tracial " in the sense that Tr ab = Tr ba (a; b 2 A) Every functional! on A is determined by a density operator D! 2 A in the form!(a) = Tr D! a (a 2 A): The entropy S(!) of a functional! is de ned by means of its density operator as S(!) = Tr (D!): This notion was introduced by von Neumann in 1927 and we term it von Neumann's entropy or shortly entropy (cf. [1]). In fact, von Neumann de ned the entropy such
A state ρ=(ρn)n is a sequence such that ρn is a density matrix on n qubits. It formalizes the notion of an infinite sequence of qubits. The von Neumann entropy H(d) of a density matrix d is the Shannon entropy of its eigenvalue distribution. We show: (1) If ρ is a computable quantum Schnorr random state then limn [H(ρn)/n] = 1. (2) We define quantum s-tests for s in [0,1], show that liminfn [H(ρn)/n] ≥ { s: ρ is covered by a quantum s-test } for computable ρ and construct states where this inequality is an equality. (3) If there is a c such that for infinitely many n, H(ρn)> n-c then (ρn)n is strong quantum random. Strong quantum randomness is a randomness notion which implies quantum Schnorr randomness relativized to any oracle.(4) A computable state (ρn)n is quantum Schnorr random iff the family of distributions of the ρn's is uniformly integrable. We show that the implications in (1) and (3) are strict.