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arXiv:2207.06048 · Physical Review A

Standard symmetrized variance with applications to coherence, uncertainty, and entanglement

Ming‐Jing Zhao, Lin Zhang, Shao-Ming Fei

Published Jul 12, 2022• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Variance is a ubiquitous quantity in quantum information theory. Given a basis, we consider the averaged variances of a fixed diagonal observable in a pure state under all possible permutations on the components of the pure state and call it symmetrized variance. Moreover, we work out the analytical expression of the symmetrized variance and find that such an expression is in the factorized form where two factors separately depend on the diagonal observable and quantum state. By shifting the factor corresponding to the diagonal observable, we introduce the notion referred to as standard symmetrized variance for the pure state which is independent of the diagonal observable. We then extend the standard symmetrized variance to mixed states in three different ways, which characterize the uncertainty, the coherence, and the coherence of assistance, respectively. These quantities are evaluated analytically and the relations among them are established. In addition, we show that standard symmetrized variance is also an entanglement measure for bipartite systems. In this way, these different quantumnesses of quantum states are unified by the variance.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.106.012417

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Variance is a ubiquitous quantity in quantum information theory. Given a basis, we consider the averaged variances of a fixed diagonal observable in a pure state under all possible permutations on the components of the pure state and call it symmetrized variance. Moreover, we work out the analytical expression of the symmetrized variance and find that such an expression is in the factorized form where two factors separately depend on the diagonal observable and quantum state. By shifting the factor corresponding to the diagonal observable, we introduce the notion referred to as standard symmetrized variance for the pure state which is independent of the diagonal observable. We then extend the standard symmetrized variance to mixed states in three different ways, which characterize the uncertainty, the coherence, and the coherence of assistance, respectively. These quantities are evaluated analytically and the relations among them are established. In addition, we show that standard symmetrized variance is also an entanglement measure for bipartite systems. In this way, these different quantumnesses of quantum states are unified by the variance.
Quantum coherence is a fundamental common trait of quantum phenomena, from the interference of matter waves to quantum degeneracy of identical particles. Despite its importance, estimating and measuring quantum coherence in generic, mixed many-body quantum states remains a formidable challenge, with fundamental implications in areas as broad as quantum condensed matter, quantum information, quantum metrology, and quantum biology. Here, we provide a quantitative definition of the variance of quantum coherent fluctuations (the quantum variance) of any observable on generic quantum states. The quantum variance generalizes the concept of thermal de Broglie wavelength (for the position of a free quantum particle) to the space of eigenvalues of any observable, quantifying the degree of coherent delocalization in that space. The quantum variance is generically measurable and computable as the difference between the static fluctuations and the static susceptibility of the observable; despite its simplicity, it is found to provide a tight lower bound to most widely accepted estimators of ``quantumness'' of observables (both as a feature as well as a resource), such as the Wigner-Yanase skew information and the quantum Fisher information. When considering bipartite fluctuations in an extended quantum system, the quantum variance expresses genuine quantum correlations among the two parts. In the case of many-body systems, it is found to obey an area law at finite temperature, extending therefore area laws of entanglement and quantum fluctuations of pure states to the mixed-state context. Hence the quantum variance paves the way to the measurement of macroscopic quantum coherence and quantum correlations in most complex quantum systems.
Uncertainty principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum theory. In the literature, there are two types of uncertainty relations, the operator form concerning the variances of physical observables and the entropy form related to entropic quantities. Both these forms are inequalities involving pairwise observables, and are found to be nontrivial to incorporate multiple observables. In this work we introduce a new form of uncertainty relation which may give out complete trade-off relations for variances of observables in pure and mixed quantum systems. Unlike the prevailing uncertainty relations, which are either quantum state dependent or not directly measurable, our bounds for variances of observables are quantum state independent and immune from the "triviality" problem of having zero expectation values. Furthermore, the new uncertainty relation may provide a geometric explanation for the reason why there are limitations on the simultaneous determination of different observables in N-dimensional Hilbert space.
The Heisenberg uncertainty relation sets a fundamental limit for quantum measurement of incompatible observables. Its standard form derived by Weyl and Robertson is of purely quantum nature when the state is pure. However, for mixed states, because the variance involving a mixed state is a hybrid of classical and quantum uncertainty, the conventional uncertainty relation is of a ``mixed'' flavor. It is desirable to seek some decomposition of variance into classical and quantum parts and to cast the Heisenberg uncertainty relation for mixed states in a more quantum form. By use of the skew information introduced by Wigner and Yanase in 1963, we make such an attempt and establish a different uncertainty relation which is stronger than the conventional one.
The uncertainty principle constitutes a cornerstone of quantum mechanics. However, its conventional formulations do not adequately describe uncertainty in scenarios involving conditional measurement. In this work, we propose uncertainty relations based on conditional variance and conditional expectation. We define the conditional expectation operator E ( A ̂ | B ̂ ) , its dual operator E ( B ̂ | A ̂ ) , and a corresponding conditional covariance term R corr . We demonstrate that even for noncommuting observables A ̂ and B ̂ , their conditional expectation operators can possess a nonvanishing commutator. This leads to a strengthened uncertainty relation applicable to both pure and mixed states. In addition to the standard term arising from the noncommutativity of the observables themselves, our relation incorporates three distinct contributions: one from the noncommutativity of the conditional expectations, one from quantum coherence, and one from the conditional covariance. These contributions collectively yield a significantly tighter lower bound. Numerical simulations verify the generality and enhanced tightness of the proposed relation. Our results provide a refined theoretical tool for the joint estimation of multiple observables in composite quantum systems, with potential applications in quantum precision metrology and secure quantum key distribution.
Abstract Quantum mechanical uncertainty relations are fundamental consequences of the incompatible nature of noncommuting observables. In terms of the coherence measure based on the Wigner-Yanase skew information, we establish several uncertainty relations for coherence with respect to von Neumann measurements, mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), and general symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measurements (SIC-POVMs), respectively. Since coherence is intimately connected with quantum uncertainties, the obtained uncertainty relations are of intrinsically quantum nature, in contrast to the conventional uncertainty relations expressed in terms of variance, which are of hybrid nature (mixing both classical and quantum uncertainties). From a dual viewpoint, we also derive some uncertainty relations for coherence of quantum states with respect to a fixed measurement. In particular, it is shown that if the density operators representing the quantum states do not commute, then there is no measurement (reference basis) such that the coherence of these states can be simultaneously small .