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arXiv:2004.05613 · Linear and Multilinear Algebra

Strict positivity and D -majorization

Frederik vom Ende

Published Dec 17, 2020• 11 citations
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Abstract

Motivated by quantum thermodynamics, we first investigate the notion of strict positivity, that is, linear maps which map positive definite states to something positive definite again. We show that strict positivity is decided by the action on any full-rank state, and that the image of non-strictly positive maps lives inside a lower-dimensional subalgebra. This implies that the distance of such maps to the identity channel is lower bounded by one. The notion of strict positivity comes in handy when generalizing the majorization ordering on real vectors with respect to a positive vector d to majorization on square matrices with respect to a positive definite matrix D. For the two-dimensional case, we give a characterization of this ordering via finitely many trace norm inequalities and, moreover, investigate some of its order properties. In particular it admits a unique minimal and a maximal element. The latter is unique as well if and only if minimal eigenvalue of D has multiplicity one.

DOI
10.1080/03081087.2020.1860887

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Motivated by quantum thermodynamics, we first investigate the notion of strict positivity, that is, linear maps which map positive definite states to something positive definite again. We show that strict positivity is decided by the action on any full-rank state, and that the image of non-strictly positive maps lives inside a lower-dimensional subalgebra. This implies that the distance of such maps to the identity channel is lower bounded by one. The notion of strict positivity comes in handy when generalizing the majorization ordering on real vectors with respect to a positive vector d to majorization on square matrices with respect to a positive definite matrix D. For the two-dimensional case, we give a characterization of this ordering via finitely many trace norm inequalities and, moreover, investigate some of its order properties. In particular it admits a unique minimal and a maximal element. The latter is unique as well if and only if minimal eigenvalue of D has multiplicity one.
Motivated by reachability questions in coherently controlled open quantum systems coupled to a thermal bath, as well as recent progress in the field of thermo-/vector-ddd-majorization we generalize classical majorization from unital quantum channels to channels with an arbitrary fixed point DDD of full rank. Such channels preserve some Gibbs-state and thus play an important role in the resource theory of quantum thermodynamics, in particular in thermo-majorization. Based on this we investigate DDD-majorization on matrices in terms of its topological and order properties, such as existence of unique maximal and minimal elements, etc. Moreover we characterize D-majorization in the qubit case via the trace norm and elaborate on why this is a challenging task when going beyond two dimensions.
Motivated by reachability questions in coherently controlled open quantum systems coupled to a thermal bath, as well as recent progress in the field of thermo-/vector-majorization we generalize classical majorization from unital quantum channels to channels with an arbitrary fixed point DDD of full rank. Such channels preserve some Gibbs-state and thus play an important role in the resource theory of quantum thermodynamics, in particular in thermo-majorization. Based on this we investigate DDD-majorization on matrices in terms of its topological and order properties, such as existence of unique maximal and minimal elements, etc. Moreover we characterize DDD-majorization in the qubit case via the trace norm and elaborate on why this is a challenging task when going beyond two dimensions.
We introduce a theory of noncommutative majorization that extends the classical majorization theory introduced by Hardy, Littlewood and Pólya to tuples of self-adjoint matrices that do not necessarily commute. We define and characterize a noncommutative majorization order that extends the classical majorization order. The definition is in terms of convex noncommutative functions, and we utilize the noncommutative convexity theory and noncommutative Choquet theory recently introduced by Davidson and the first author. As an application, we obtain a new necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a trace-preserving completely positive map, i.e. a quantum channel, that interpolates between two finite sets of matrices. We give examples demonstrating that it is not always possible for this map to be chosen mixed unitary, even locally. We also address the computational difficulty of verifying the noncommutative majorization order. Our results further apply beyond the tracial case, and we obtain more general results characterizing the existence of unital completely positive maps that preserve an arbitrary faithful state or even unital completely positive map.
Uhlmann showed that there exists a positive, unital and trace-preserving map transforming a Hermitian matrix AAA into another BBB if and only if the vector of eigenvalues of AAA majorizes that of BBB. In this work I characterize the existence of such a transformation when one of the conditions of unitality or trace preservation is dropped. This induces two possible preorders in the set of Hermitian matrices and I argue how this can be used to construct measures quantifying the lack of positive semidefiniteness of any given Hermitian matrix with relevant monotonicity properties. It turns out that the measures in each of the two formalisms are essentially unique.
We investigate linear maps between matrix algebras that remain positive under tensor powers, i.e., under tensoring with n copies of themselves. Completely positive and completely co-positive maps are trivial examples of this kind. We show that for every n ∈ ℕ, there exist non-trivial maps with this property and that for two-dimensional Hilbert spaces there is no non-trivial map for which this holds for all n. For higher dimensions, we reduce the existence question of such non-trivial “tensor-stable positive maps” to a one-parameter family of maps and show that an affirmative answer would imply the existence of non-positive partial transpose bound entanglement. As an application, we show that any tensor-stable positive map that is not completely positive yields an upper bound on the quantum channel capacity, which for the transposition map gives the well-known cb-norm bound. We, furthermore, show that the latter is an upper bound even for the local operations and classical communications-assisted quantum capacity, and that moreover it is a strong converse rate for this task.
In this paper, we consider all possible variants of Choi matrices of linear maps, and show that they are determined by non-degenerate bilinear forms on the domain space. We will do this in the setting of finite dimensional vector spaces. In case of matrix algebras, we characterize all variants of Choi matrices which retain the usual correspondences between k-superpositivity and Schmidt number ≤k as well as k-positivity and k-block-positivity. We also compare de Pillis’ definition [Pac. J. Math. 23, 129–137 (1967)] and Choi’s definition [Linear Algebra Appl. 10, 285–290 (1975)], which arise from different bilinear forms.