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arXiv:1810.08034 · Reports on Progress in Physics

Quantum fidelity measures for mixed states

Yeong-Cherng Liang, Yu-Hao Yeh, Paulo E. M. F. Mendonça, Run Yan Teh, M. D. Reid, P. D. Drummond

Published Apr 25, 2019• 177 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Applications of quantum technology often require fidelities to quantify performance. These provide a fundamental yardstick for the comparison of two quantum states. While this is straightforward in the case of pure states, it is much more subtle for the more general case of mixed quantum states often found in practice. A large number of different proposals exist. In this review, we summarize the required properties of a quantum fidelity measure, and compare them, to determine which properties each of the different measures has. We show that there are large classes of measures that satisfy all the required properties of a fidelity measure, just as there are many norms of Hilbert space operators, and many measures of entropy. We compare these fidelities, with detailed proofs of their properties. We also summarize briefly the applications of these measures in teleportation, quantum memories and quantum computers, quantum communications, and quantum phase-space simulations.

DOI
10.1088/1361-6633/ab1ca4

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Applications of quantum technology often require fidelities to quantify performance. These provide a fundamental yardstick for the comparison of two quantum states. While this is straightforward in the case of pure states, it is much more subtle for the more general case of mixed quantum states often found in practice. A large number of different proposals exist. In this review, we summarize the required properties of a quantum fidelity measure, and compare them, to determine which properties each of the different measures has. We show that there are large classes of measures that satisfy all the required properties of a fidelity measure, just as there are many norms of Hilbert space operators, and many measures of entropy. We compare these fidelities, with detailed proofs of their properties. We also summarize briefly the applications of these measures in teleportation, quantum memories and quantum computers, quantum communications, and quantum phase-space simulations.
The paper is an elaborate comparative assessment of the most relevant entropy-based quantities to be applied in quantifying quantum entanglement in pure, mixed, bipartite, and multipartite quantum systems. The study fills the existing gap in the literature in which most of the previous literature examines individual measures, but a lot of knowledge is lacking on what these measures are regarding their strengths, weaknesses, and the operational usefulness against each other. The study can prove the behaviour of each measure under noise, decoherence, dimensional scaling, and variation of state-type by analysing von Neumann entropy, the Tsallis entropy, entropy of entanglement of formation, concurrence and logarithmic negativity. Numerical studies with pure two-qubit states, Werner states, GHZ states, W states and mixed random states demonstrate specific sensitivity properties and computational limitations which ensure that no single measure can be a universal quantifier. The paper goes on to say that entropy-only measures do not work in mixed regimes because of a dominance in classical correlations. The results have several important implications to quantum communication, quantum simulation, and quantum computing in the NISQ-era, where the choice of measurement has a direct impact on benchmarking, error-correction scheme, and protocol performance based on entanglement. The paper ends with a recommendation of contextual, purpose-based scheme of selecting entanglement measures and suggests a further study on scalable benchmarking, hybrid quantifiers, and operational performance-based entanglement measurements. These observations reinforce the theoretical premise of entanglement studies and enable the advancement of more effective quantum technologies in the field of practice.
Fidelity is a fundamental measure for the closeness of two quantum states, which is important both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. Yet, in general, it is difficult to give good estimates of fidelity, especially when one works with mixed states over Hilbert spaces of very high dimension. Although, there has been some progress on fidelity estimation, all prior work either requires a large number of identical copies of the relevant states, or relies on unproven heuristics. In this work, we improve on both of these aspects by developing new and efficient quantum algorithms for fidelity estimation with provable performance guarantees in case at least one of the states is approximately low-rank. Our algorithms use advanced quantum linear algebra techniques, such as the quantum singular value transformation, as well as density matrix exponentiation and quantum spectral sampling. As a complementary result, we prove that fidelity estimation to any non-trivial constant additive accuracy is hard in general, by giving a sample complexity lower bound that depends polynomially on the dimension. Moreover, if circuit descriptions for the relevant states are provided, we show that the task is hard for the complexity class called (honest verifier) quantum statistical zero knowledge via a reduction to a closely related result by Watrous.
We propose an alternative fidelity measure (namely, a measure of the degree of similarity) between quantum states and benchmark it against a number of properties of the standard Uhlmann-Jozsa fidelity. This measure is a simple function of the linear entropy and the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product between the given states and is thus, in comparison, not as computationally demanding. It also features several remarkable properties such as being jointly concave and satisfying all of Jozsa's axioms. The trade-off, however, is that it is supermultiplicative and does not behave monotonically under quantum operations. In addition, metrics for the space of density matrices are identified and the joint concavity of the Uhlmann-Jozsa fidelity for qubit states is established.
We investigate the coherence measures induced by fidelity and trace norm, based on the coherence quantification recently proposed by Baumgratz et al. [T. Baumgratz, M. Cramer, and M. B. Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)]. We show that the fidelity of coherence does not in general satisfy the monotonicity requirement as a measure of coherence under the subselection of the measurement condition. We find that the trace norm of coherence can act as a measure of coherence for qubits and some special class of qutrits with some restrictions on the incoherent operators, while the general case needs to be explored further.
A quantum ensemble ${({p}_{x},{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{x})}$ 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 optimal transportation problem, while the second one uses the idea of extended-Hilbert-space (EHS) representations which introduce auxiliary pointer (or flag) states. Both types of measures enjoy a number of desirable properties. The Kantorovich measures, albeit monotonic under deterministic quantum operations, are not monotonic under generalized measurements. In contrast, the EHS measures are. This property can be regarded as a generalization of the monotonicity under deterministic maps of the trace distance and the fidelity between states. The EHS measures are equivalent to convex optimization problems and are bounded by the Kantorovich measures which are equivalent to linear programs. We present operational interpretations for both types of measures. We also show that the EHS fidelity between ensembles provides an interpretation of the fidelity between mixed states as the fidelity between all pure-state ensembles whose averages are equal to the mixed states being compared. We finally use the measures to define distance and fidelity for stochastic quantum channels and positive operator-valued measures. These quantities may be useful in the context of tomography of stochastic quantum channels and quantum detectors.