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arXiv:1909.06118 · Physical Review A

Quasi-inversion of qubit channels

Vahid Karimipour, Fabio Benatti, Roberto Floreanini B

Published Mar 16, 2020• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In general quantum operations, or quantum channels cannot be inverted by physical operations, i.e., by completely positive trace-preserving maps. An arbitrary state passing through a quantum channel loses its fidelity with the input. Given a quantum channel $\mathcal{E}$, we discuss the concept of its quasi-inverse as a completely positive trace-preserving map ${\mathcal{E}}^{qi}$ which when composed with $\mathcal{E}$ increases its average input-output fidelity in an optimal way. The channel ${\mathcal{E}}^{qi}$ comes as close as possible to the inverse of a quantum channel. We give a complete classification of such maps for qubit channels and provide quite a few illustrative examples.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.032109

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In general quantum operations, or quantum channels cannot be inverted by physical operations, i.e., by completely positive trace-preserving maps. An arbitrary state passing through a quantum channel loses its fidelity with the input. Given a quantum channel E\mathcal{E}E, we discuss the concept of its quasi-inverse as a completely positive trace-preserving map Eqi{\mathcal{E}}^{qi}Eqi which when composed with E\mathcal{E}E increases its average input-output fidelity in an optimal way. The channel Eqi{\mathcal{E}}^{qi}Eqi comes as close as possible to the inverse of a quantum channel. We give a complete classification of such maps for qubit channels and provide quite a few illustrative examples.
We found the quasi inverse of qubit channels as a unitary map, Ei\mathcal{E}^iEi, by minimizing the average trace distance between the input state to the channel and the output of the quasi inverse channel for arbitrary qubit channel E\mathcal{E}E and for arbitrary input states. The channel E\mathcal{E}E was assumed completely positive and trace-preserving. To find the quasi inverse for mixed states, we proposed an alternative definition of the quasi inverse based on the mean square of the trace distance (MSTD) of a channel. The definition based on the trace distance allowed easy generalization of the quasi inverse to mixed input states. The quasi inverse of the Pauli, generalized amplitude damping, mixed unitary, and tetrahedron channels calculated based on the MSTD agreed with the one computed using average fidelity in the special case of input states being pure.
A quantum channel is defined as being completely positive (CP) and trace preserving (TP). While not every quantum channel is invertible or reversible, every quantum channel admits various kinds of generalized inverses such as the Moore-Penrose inverse and the Drazin inverse. A generalized inverse of a quantum channel may not itself be a quantum channel: it often fails to be CP. However, generalized inverses still play an important role in quantum error mitigation. Here, because it is often desirable for the generalized inverse of a quantum channel to be at least TP, the Drazin inverse, which is TP, is favoured over the Moore-Penrose inverse, which is not in general TP. In this paper, we take a categorical perspective on generalized inverses of quantum channels. This allows us to give a simple proof of the fact that the Drazin inverse of a quantum channel is always TP. It also allows us to show that for unital quantum channels, the Drazin inverse is also unital. We then generalize this result to dagger Drazin inverses, which allows us to show that for unital quantum channels, the Moore-Penrose inverse is both TP and unital as well. This opens the door to new applications of both the Drazin inverse and Moore-Penrose inverse in quantum information theory and, in particular, in quantum error mitigation.
Quantum channels are not invertible in general. A quasi-inverse allows for a partial recovery of the input state, but its analytical results are found only in a restricted space of its parameters. This work explores the potential of neural networks to find the quasi-inverse of qubit channels for any values of the channel parameters while keeping the quasi-inverse as a physically realizable quantum operation. We introduce a physics-inspired loss function based on the mean of the square of the modified trace distance (MSMTD). The scaled trace distance is used so that the neural network does not increase the length of the Bloch vector of the quantum states, which ensures that the network behaves as a completely positive and trace-preserving (CPTP) quantum channel. The Kraus operators of the quasi-inverse channel were obtained by performing quantum process tomography on the trained neural network.
For a given set of input-output pairs of quantum states or observables, we ask the question whether there exists a physically implementable transformation that maps each of the inputs to the corresponding output. The physical maps on quantum states are trace-preserving completely positive maps, but we also consider variants of these requirements. We generalize the definition of complete positivity to linear maps defined on arbitrary subspaces, then formulate this notion as a semidefinite program, and relate it by duality to approximative extensions of this map. This gives a characterization of the maps which can be approximated arbitrarily well as the restriction of a map that is completely positive on the whole algebra, also yielding the familiar extension theorems on operator spaces. For quantum channel extensions and extensions by probabilistic operations we obtain semidefinite characterizations, and we also elucidate the special case of Abelian inputs or outputs. Finally, revisiting a theorem by Alberti and Uhlmann, we provide simpler and more widely applicable conditions for certain extension problems on qubits, and by using a semidefinite programming formulation we exhibit counterexamples to seemingly reasonable but false generalizations of the Alberti-Uhlmann theorem.
Entanglement fidelity quantifies how well a quantum channel preserves the correlations between a transmitted system and an inaccessible reference system. We derive closed-form expressions for the entanglement fidelity associated with several standard quantum noise models, including the random Pauli-X, dephasing, depolarizing, Werner-Holevo, generalized Pauli (Weyl), and amplitude-damping channels. For each model, we express the entanglement fidelity in terms of a general input density operator ρρρ, using Schumacher's Kraus-operator approach, which provides a channel-agnostic recipe applicable to any completely positive trace-preserving (CPTP) map with a finite Kraus representation. We then specialize to a communication scenario in which the source emits a two-letter parametric alphabet, thereby making explicit the dependence of entanglement preservation on both channel and source parameters. The resulting expressions enable direct comparisons of channel performance and rankings for representative families of input states, including common qubit states.