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arXiv:2404.03247 · Physical Review A

Stronger speed limit for observables: Tighter bound for the capacity of entanglement, the modular Hamiltonian, and the charging of a quantum battery

Divyansh Shrimali, Biswaranjan Panda, Arun Kumar Pati

Published Aug 15, 2024• 13 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

How fast an observable can evolve in time is answered by so-called observable speed limit. Here, we prove a stronger version of the observable speed limit and show that the previously obtained bound is a special case of the new bound. The stronger quantum speed limit for the state also follows from the stronger quantum speed limit for observables (SQSLO). We apply this to prove a stronger bound for the entanglement rate using the notion of capacity of entanglement (the quantum information theoretic counterpart of the heat capacity) and show that it outperforms previous bounds. Furthermore, we apply the SQSLO for the rate of modular Hamiltonian and in the context of interacting qubits in a quantum battery. These illustrative examples reveal that the speed limit for the modular energy and the time required to charge the battery can be exactly predicted using the new bound. This shows that for estimating the charging time of quantum battery SQSLO is actually tight, i.e., it saturates. Our findings can have important applications in quantum thermodynamics, the complexity of operator growth, predicting the time rate of quantum correlation growth, and quantum technology, in general.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.110.022425

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How fast an observable can evolve in time is answered by so-called observable speed limit. Here, we prove a stronger version of the observable speed limit and show that the previously obtained bound is a special case of the new bound. The stronger quantum speed limit for the state also follows from the stronger quantum speed limit for observables (SQSLO). We apply this to prove a stronger bound for the entanglement rate using the notion of capacity of entanglement (the quantum information theoretic counterpart of the heat capacity) and show that it outperforms previous bounds. Furthermore, we apply the SQSLO for the rate of modular Hamiltonian and in the context of interacting qubits in a quantum battery. These illustrative examples reveal that the speed limit for the modular energy and the time required to charge the battery can be exactly predicted using the new bound. This shows that for estimating the charging time of quantum battery SQSLO is actually tight, i.e., it saturates. Our findings can have important applications in quantum thermodynamics, the complexity of operator growth, predicting the time rate of quantum correlation growth, and quantum technology, in general.
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.
The traditional quantum speed limits are not attainable for many physical processes, as they tend to be loose and fail to determine the exact time taken by quantum systems to evolve. To address this we derive exact quantum speed limits for the unitary dynamics of pure-state quantum systems that outperform the existing quantum speed limits. Using these exact quantum speed limits, we can precisely estimate the evolution time for two- and higher-dimensional quantum systems. Additionally, for both finite- and infinite-dimensional quantum systems, we derive an improved Mandelstam-Tamm bound for pure states and show that this bound always saturates for any unitary generated by self-inverse Hamiltonians. Furthermore, we show that our speed limits establish an upper bound on the quantum computational circuit complexity and yield a tighter quantum Cramér-Rao bound. These results will have a significant impact on our understanding of quantum physics as well as rapidly developing quantum technologies, such as quantum computing, quantum control, and quantum batteries.
We introduce the notion of a reverse quantum speed limit for arbitrary quantum evolution which answers a fundamental question: How slowly can a quantum system evolve in time? Using the geometrical approach to quantum mechanics, the reverse speed limit follows from the fact that the gauge-invariant length of the reference section is always greater than the Fubini-Study distance on the projective Hilbert space of the quantum system. We illustrate the reverse speed limit for two-level quantum systems with an external driving Hamiltonian and show that our results hold well. We find several examples where our bound is tight. We also find one practical application of the reverse speed limit in the discharging process of quantum batteries, which answers the following question: How slowly can quantum batteries discharge? Our result provides a lower bound on the average discharging power of quantum batteries.
Complete quantum charging provides a sharp setting in which to ask how much multipartite entanglement is forced by speed itself. For a closed NNN-qubit battery evolving from ∣↓⟩⊗N\ket{\downarrow}^{\otimes N}∣↓⟩⊗N to ∣↑⟩⊗N\ket{\uparrow}^{\otimes N}∣↑⟩⊗N under a time-independent Hamiltonian, we exactly solve the pure-state depth-constrained speed problem. If the realized trajectory has entanglement depth at most kkk, then the largest possible QSL-normalized rate η=τQSL/Tη=τ_{\rm QSL}/Tη=τQSL​/T is ηmax⁡(k)=⌈N/k⌉−1/2η_{\max}(k)=\lceil N/k\rceil^{-1/2}ηmax​(k)=⌈N/k⌉−1/2. Conversely, an observed rate ηηη certifies trajectory entanglement depth at least ⌈N/⌊η−2⌋⌉\bigl\lceil N/\lfloor η^{-2}\rfloor\bigr\rceil⌈N/⌊η−2⌋⌉. The mechanism is block orthogonalization: under a fixed product partition, complete charging forces all blocks to orthogonalize simultaneously, and the quantum speed limit converts this counting constraint into the speed bound. Balanced cluster-flip evolutions saturate the bound, establishing an exact integer staircase frontier. Thus fast complete charging cannot be explained by many small independently charging blocks; in particular, crossing the threshold η>1/2η>1/\sqrt2η>1/2​ certifies, for N>1N>1N>1, the generation of genuine NNN-partite entanglement.
The presence of noise or the interaction with an environment can radically change the dynamics of observables of an otherwise isolated quantum system.We derive a bound on the speed with which observables of open quantum systems evolve.This speed limit is divided into Mandelstam and Tamm's original time-energy uncertainty relation and a time-information uncertainty relation recently derived for classical systems, and both are generalized to open quantum systems.By isolating the coherent and incoherent contributions to the system dynamics, we derive both lower and upper bounds on the speed of evolution.We prove that the latter provide tighter limits on the speed of observables than previously known quantum speed limits and that a preferred basis of speed operators serves to completely characterize the observables that saturate the speed limits.We use this construction to bound the effect of incoherent dynamics on the evolution of an observable and to find the Hamiltonian that gives the maximum coherent speedup to the evolution of an observable.
The notion of capacity of entanglement is the quantum information theoretic counterpart of the heat capacity which is defined as the second cumulant of the entanglement spectrum. Given any bipartite pure state, we can define the capacity of entanglement as the variance of the modular Hamiltonian in the reduced state of any of the subsystems. Here, we study the dynamics of this quantity under a nonlocal Hamiltonian. Specifically, we address the following question: Given an arbitrary nonlocal Hamiltonian, what is the capacity of entanglement that the system can possess? As a useful application, we show that the quantum speed limit for creating the entanglement is not only governed by the fluctuation in the nonlocal Hamiltonian, but also depends inversely on the time average of the square root of the capacity of entanglement. Furthermore, we discuss this quantity for a general self-inverse Hamiltonian and provide a bound on the rate of capacity of entanglement. Towards the end, we generalize the capacity of entanglement for bipartite mixed states based on the relative entropy of entanglement and show that the above definition reduces to the capacity of entanglement for pure bipartite states. Our results can have several applications in diverse areas of physics.