In the Schr\"odinger picture, the state of a quantum system evolves in time and the quantum speed limit describes how fast the state of a quantum system evolves from an initial state to a final state. However, in the Heisenberg picture the observable evolves in time instead of the state vector. Therefore, it is natural to ask how fast an observable evolves in time. This can impose a fundamental bound on the evolution time of the expectation value of quantum-mechanical observables. We obtain the quantum speed limit time bound for observable for closed systems, open quantum systems, and arbitrary dynamics. Furthermore, we discuss various applications of these bounds. Our results can have several applications ranging from setting the speed limit for operator growth, correlation growth, quantum thermal machines, quantum control, and many-body physics.
In the Schr"odinger picture, the state of a quantum system evolves in time and the quantum speed limit describes how fast the state of a quantum system evolves from an initial state to a final state. However, in the Heisenberg picture the observable evolves in time instead of the state vector. Therefore, it is natural to ask how fast an observable evolves in time. This can impose a fundamental bound on the evolution time of the expectation value of quantum-mechanical observables. We obtain the quantum speed limit time bound for observable for closed systems, open quantum systems, and arbitrary dynamics. Furthermore, we discuss various applications of these bounds. Our results can have several applications ranging from setting the speed limit for operator growth, correlation growth, quantum thermal machines, quantum control, and many-body physics.
Quantum speed limits are rigorous estimates on how fast a state of a quantum system can depart from the initial state in the course of quantum evolution. Most known quantum speed limits, including the celebrated Mandelstam-Tamm and Margolus-Levitin ones, are general bounds applicable to arbitrary initial states. However, when applied to mixed states of many-body systems, they, as a rule, dramatically overestimate the speed of quantum evolution and fail to provide meaningful bounds in the thermodynamic limit. Here we derive a quantum speed limit for a closed system initially prepared in a thermal state and evolving under a time-dependent Hamiltonian. This quantum speed limit exploits the structure of the thermal state and, in particular, explicitly depends on the temperature. In a broad class of many-body setups it proves to be drastically stronger than general quantum speed limits.
The quantum speed limit sets a fundamental restriction on the evolution time of quantum systems. We explore the relationship between quantum imaginarity and the quantum speed limit by utilizing measures such as relative entropy, trace distance, and geometric imaginarity. These speed limits define the fundamental constraints on the minimum time necessary for quantum systems to evolve under various dynamical processes. As applications the dephasing dynamics and dissipative dynamics are analyzed in detail. The quantum speed limit in stochastic-approximate transformations is also investigated. Our quantum speed limits provide lower bounds on how fast a physical system evolves to attain or lose certain imaginarity, with potential applications in efficient quantum computation designs, quantum control and quantum sensing.
As one of the fundamental questions, quantum speed limit (QSL) is of vital role in the community of quantum physics, which sets the ultimate, maximal speed with which a quantum system can evolve. QSL originated from the understanding of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. In 1945, Mandelstam and Tamm found the time Δt in the celebrated relation ΔEΔt≥ℏ could be thought as the minimum time that a quantum system needs to evolve from an initial state to the orthogonal state for unitary evolution. QSL sets the lower bound of the evolution. They established the relationship between the minimum evolution time ( τQSL ) and the energy uncertainty of the system (ΔE), namely τQSL=πℏ/(2ΔE) , the Mandelstam-Tamm (MT) bound. Later, Margolus and Levitin derived another different bound for a closed system which connected the τQSL with the average energy of the system ( 〈E〉 ), i.e., τQSL=πℏ/(2〈E〉) , the Margolus-Levitin (ML) bound. Combining the MT and ML bounds together, we can have a unified bound for a unitary system and orthogonal states. In the case of open system dynamics, because there is energy and/or coherence exchange between the system and the environment, the orthogonal final state of the initial state can hardly be reached any longer. An investigation of the QSL on non-unitary quantum evolution needs to be considered. The generalized QSLs are established by employing the distance between the distinguishable states. Different metrics define different distances, leading to different QSL bounds. We show a few typical generalized QSL bounds based on different metrics. And the unified QSL bound for non-unitary evolution is obtained by combining the generalized MT and ML bounds under the same metric. The generations and developments of QSL have successfully generalized the MT bounds. Even the ML bounds have been attempted to generalize, the current studies of ML bound are thought as the significantly harder task, and keep as the open questions. The influences of external environment and quantum system dynamics which include the role of entanglement in QSL for open dynamics and many-body systems, the relation between the maximum interaction speed and QSL in quantum spin systems, the non-Markovianity effect of the environment on accelerating the speed of evolution have been investigated. Furthermore, by employing the gauge invariant distance in the Riemannian metric, we establish a distinct QSL bound, which relates the quantum speed limit time to the geometry phase, and presents the geometric and gauge invariant properties of it. The bound shows the impacts of the transmission modes of the state vectors on the evolution path in the manifold. Different from the established MT and ML bounds, our bound establishes the relation between the QSL and the Pancharatnam connection 1-form, and our results show that the QSL can be controlled via manipulating the generalized Pahcharatnam connection. Also, our results of QSL are holonomy via the generalized Pahcharatnam connection, which show us a possible technique to speed up the holonomic quantum computation. The bound is also interesting to the metrology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc. QSL has also been studied in the quantum representation of Wigner function. In the future research of quantum speed limit, there are many issues that need to be considered, such as the generalized ML bound, the unified QSL bound under different metrics, the application of maximum rate of quantum information derived from the QSL, and the relation between the quantum speed limit and the quantum heat engine, etc.
The quantum speed limit provides fundamental bound on how fast a quantum system can evolve between the initial and the final states. For the unitary evolution, the celebrated Mandelstam-Tamm (MT) bound has been widely studied for various systems. Here, we prove a stronger quantum speed limit (SQSL) for all quantum systems undergoing arbitrary unitary evolution and show that the MT bound is a special case of the stronger quantum speed limit. We apply our result for single system as well as for composite systems in separable and entangled states and show that the new bound is indeed tight. The stronger quantum speed limit will have wide range of applications in quantum control, quantum computing and quantum information processing.
Speed of state transitions in macroscopic systems is a crucial concept for foundations of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics as well as various applications in quantum technology represented by optimal quantum control.While extensive studies have made efforts to obtain rigorous constraints on dynamical processes since Mandelstam and Tamm, speed limits that provide tight bounds for macroscopic transitions have remained elusive.Here, by employing the local conservation law of probability, the fundamental principle in physics, we develop a general framework for deriving qualitatively tighter speed limits for macroscopic systems than many conventional ones.We show for the first time that the speed of the expectation value of an observable defined on an arbitrary graph, which can describe general many-body systems, is bounded by the "gradient" of the observable, in contrast with conventional speed limits depending on the entire range of the observable.This framework enables us to derive novel quantum speed limits for macroscopic unitary dynamics.Unlike previous bounds, the speed limit decreases when the expectation value of the transition Hamiltonian increases; this intuitively describes a new trade-off relation between time and the quantum phase difference.Our bound is dependent on instantaneous quantum states and thus can achieve the equality condition, which is conceptually distinct from the Lieb-Robinson bound.We also find that, beyond expectation values of macroscopic observables, the speed of macroscopic quantum coherence can be bounded from above by our general approach.The newly obtained bounds are verified in transport phenomena in particle systems and nonequilibrium dynamics in many-body spin systems.We also demonstrate that our strategy can be applied for finding new speed limits for macroscopic transitions in stochastic systems, including quantum ones, where the bounds are expressed by the entropy production rate.Our work elucidates novel speed limits on the basis of local conservation law, providing fundamental limits to various types of nonequilibrium quantum macroscopic phenomena.
Quantum speed limits establish fundamental bounds on the minimum time required for a quantum system to evolve from an initial state to a target state. Traditional formulations treat the evolution speed as a single global quantity governed by the system energy uncertainty or average energy. In this paper, we propose the theory of Quantum Speed-Limit Splitting, which posits that a quantum system undergoing complex dynamics does not necessarily evolve along a single speed limit, but may instead exhibit multiple competing, distinct state-evolution speed limits simultaneously. By defining a multi-valued velocity spectrum belonging to the set {v_1, v_2, ..., v_n}, we demonstrate that different geometric pathways in the underlying Hilbert space correspond to distinct temporal boundaries. We formulate the mathematical framework, replacing the traditional scalar evolution time with a set of multi-branch bounds {tau_1, tau_2, ...}. This theoretical extension provides a novel lens for viewing quantum dynamics, with profound implications for quantum control, thermodynamic cost, and the fundamental limits of information processing.