Quantum systems subjected to a continuous weak measurement process evolve according to stochastic differential equations. Depending on the outcomes of these stochastic measurements, the quantum state may diffuse in various directions across the state space. This note points out that, in many scenarios relevant to quantum engineering, this diffusion is effectively constrained to a low-dimensional space. Specifically, the quantum state remains confined to a low-dimensional, nonlinear manifold---often time-dependent, yet independent of the specific measurement outcomes. This note derives the corresponding low-dimensional formulations for expressing the stochastically evolving state in several prototypical cases: quantum nondemolition measurements in arbitrary dimensions; quadrature measurements of a harmonic oscillator (linear quantum system); and measurements of subsystems within multipartite quantum systems. Additionally, it introduces an algebraic criterion to determine whether such low-dimensional manifolds exist or persist when additional dynamics are present.
Quantum systems subjected to a continuous weak measurement process evolve according to stochastic differential equations. Depending on the outcomes of these stochastic measurements, the quantum state may diffuse in various directions across the state space. This note points out that, in many scenarios relevant to quantum engineering, this diffusion is effectively constrained to a low-dimensional space. Specifically, the quantum state remains confined to a low-dimensional, nonlinear manifold---often time-dependent, yet independent of the specific measurement outcomes. This note derives the corresponding low-dimensional formulations for expressing the stochastically evolving state in several prototypical cases: quantum nondemolition measurements in arbitrary dimensions; quadrature measurements of a harmonic oscillator (linear quantum system); and measurements of subsystems within multipartite quantum systems. Additionally, it introduces an algebraic criterion to determine whether such low-dimensional manifolds exist or persist when additional dynamics are present.
In the last chapter, we dealt with the wide class of physical operations that preserve the Gaussian character of the initial state, treating them as discrete transformations. Here, we describe what could loosely be considered the continuous-time version of such transformations. This chapter is intended to provide the reader with the tools to describe a wide range of notable quantum dynamics, with a very broad applicative scope. After a note on the action of linear and quadratic Hamiltonians, whose description follows directly from the theory of Gaussian states presented in Chapter 3 but was not explicitly clarified so far, we shall address systems linearly coupled to a reservoir of modes that are delta-correlated in time (a situation commonly referred to as ‘white noise’), and thus give rise to Markovian dynamics which we shall refer to as ‘diffusive’ for reasons that will be made clear in due time. Our story will commence with a derivation of the Gaussian dynamics resulting from such an environmental coupling, in the form of dynamical equations for the first and second statistical moments. Besides their interest per se , the latter will be instrumental in obtaining an unconventional derivation of the master equations that govern general, not necessarily Gaussian, quantum states under the same conditions. The corresponding quantum Langevin equations for the canonical operators in the Heisenberg picture will also be derived. Next, we will turn our attention to the study of the system's dynamics that result from the measurement of the environment. This is a topic with a longstanding tradition in quantum mechanics, grounded in the formalism of quantum stochastic calculus that emerged within the mathematical physics community as early as the seventies, and then re-introduced as the quantum trajectories approach in quantum optics almost twenty years later. The ‘weak’ POVMs resulting from observing a weakly coupled environment (as opposed to ‘strong’, projective measurements), carried out continuously in time (a prescription customarily subsumed by the term ‘monitoring’), leads to a stochastic dynamics for the system, where the randomness of the measurement outcomes is compactly and most elegantly represented by infinitesimal stochastic increments, giving rise to continuous but not differentiable quantum dynamics. Existing approaches to this subject tend to be quite impervious to the uninitiated. In the quantum optics literature, this is largely due to the technicalities involved in incorporating the discontinuous update of the quantum state prescribed by the von Neumann postulate. More mathematically oriented treatments have instead typically preferred an algebraic approach where the usual difficulty of describing measurements in the Heisenberg picture is compounded by the adoption of a rather abstract hierarchy of filters, in part inspired by classical control theory, to describe different possible updates of the quantum state. This state of affairs is further complicated by the added difficulties that come with the necessary introduction of some form of quantum stochastic calculus. Our approach to monitoring will therefore take a different route. Like in our derivation of diffusion and master equations, we shall keep restricting to linear couplings with a white noise environment, forfeiting full generality This situation is well modelled by the so called input-output formalism, whose physical origin will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9 , which approximates reliably, among other instances, the interaction between internal resonating modes and electromagnetic radiation leaking in and out of an optical cavity. First, we shall introduce stochastic Wiener increments and the Itô rule, which will arise naturally from the identification of the continuum field's modes subject to monitoring. We shall deliberately keep our arsenal of stochastic methods to these bare essentials, sacrificing to some extent both depth and generality, but still providing the reader with a powerful and seminal demonstration of the formalism. We shall then restrict to Gaussian general-dyne detections and apply the exact formalism developed in the previous chapter to the continuous filtering of the system's state conditioned by such measurements' outcomes. Next, as in our derivation of the unconditional master equations, we shall use the Gaussian dynamics as a key to unlock the full stochastic master equations governing general states. Hence, we will build on the quantum theory of filtering in the Gaussian regime to derive dynamical equations for linear feedback control and also apply our theoretical tools to the enhanced production of squeezing. Finally, we will turn to the closely related paradigm of coherent feedback, where environmental modes do not undergo measurements but are fed back to interact coherently with the system, see in detail how it modifies Gaussian diffusive dynamics and assess its potential for control by reconsidering the production of squeezing assisted by interferometric coherent feedback loops.
This paper studies the stochastic differential equation (SDE) associated with a two-level quantum system (qubit) subject to Hamiltonian evolution as well as unmonitored and monitored decoherence channels. The latter imply a stochastic evolution of the quantum state (density operator), whose associated probability distribution we characterize. We first show that for two sets of typical experimental settings, corresponding either to weak quantum non-demolition measurements or to weak fluorescence measurements, the three Bloch coordinates of the qubit remain confined to a deterministically evolving surface or curve inside the Bloch sphere. We explicitly solve the deterministic evolution, and we provide a closed-form expression for the probability distribution on this surface or curve. Then we relate the existence in general of such deterministically evolving submanifolds to an accessibility question of control theory, which can be answered with an explicit algebraic criterion on the SDE. This allows us to show that, for a qubit, the above two sets of weak measurements are essentially the only ones featuring deterministic surfaces or curves.
Stochastic nonlinear dynamics underlie many models in engineering and computational physics, yet accurate high-dimensional simulation remains challenging. We present a quantum algorithm for a broad class of N-dimensional stochastic differential equations with dissipation and quadratic drift. The algorithm applies to strongly nonlinear systems with all-to-all interactions, thereby extending the scope of previously known quantum algorithms that were limited to weak nonlinearity and sparse systems. For norm-preserving drifts, a condition satisfied by key fluid dynamics discretizations, our method approximates expectation values of low-order correlation functions with rigorous error bounds at a cost polynomial in log(N) and linear in the evolution time. Our main technical advance is a subroutine for simulating an auxiliary system of N interacting quantum harmonic oscillators with cost polylogarithmic in N. Finally, we formulate turbulence models, including Navier-Stokes and damped Euler equations, within this framework, opening a route to quantum simulation of strongly nonlinear SDEs governing turbulence and nonlinear wave dynamics.
In this paper, we examine an open quantum system that is subject to indirect and imperfect measurements. Specifically, for quantum non-demolition (QND) measurements, we show that the evolution of the system is confined to a properly selected manifold. This allows us to express the exact solution of the quantum filter equation in terms of a lower-dimensional stochastic differential equation, significantly reducing the computational complexity. Motivated by a quantum state reduction result for the predicted dynamics under QND measurement, we propose, in the case when the Hamiltonian and the coupling operator do not commute, a projection filter approach for the quantum state estimation. The efficiency of the proposed quantum projection filter is verified by numerical simulations. The latter suggest that, even when paired with a stabilizing feedback control mechanism that depends on the projected state, the filter maintains its robustness. More generally, our numerical results suggest the effectiveness of the adopted quantum projection filter approach as a method for state estimation and feedback stabilization of open quantum systems.
In this letter, we consider an open quantum system undergoing imperfect and indirect measurement. For quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement, we show that the system evolves on an appropriately chosen manifold and we express the exact solution of the quantum filter equation in terms of the solution of a lower dimensional stochastic differential equation. In order to further reduce the dimension of the system under study, we consider the projection on the lower dimensional manifold originally introduced in Gao et al. (2019) for the case of perfect measurements. An error analysis is performed to evaluate the precision of this approximate quantum filter, focusing on the case of QND measurement. Simulations suggest the efficiency of the proposed quantum projection filter, even in presence of a stabilizing feedback control which depends on the projection filter.
An effective approach to modeling non-Markovian quantum systems is to embed a principal (quantum) system of interest into a larger quantum system. A widely employed embedding is one that uses another quantum system, referred to as the auxiliary system, which is coupled to the principal system, and both the principal and auxiliary can be coupled to quantum white noise processes. The principal and auxiliary together form a quantum Markov system and the quantum white noises act as a bath (environment) for this system. Recently it was shown that the conditional evolution of the principal system in this embedding under continuous monitoring by a travelling quantum probe can be expressed as a system of coupled stochastic differential equations (SDEs) that involve only operators of the principal system. The reduced conditional state of the principal only (conditioned on the measurement outcomes) are determined by the “diagonal" blocks of this coupled systems of SDEs. It is shown here that the “off-diagonal" blocks can be exactly eliminated up to their initial conditions, leaving a reduced closed system of SDEs for the diagonal blocks only. Under additional conditions the off-diagonal initial conditions can be made to vanish. This new closed system of equations, which includes an integration term involving a two-time stochastic kernel, represents the non-Markovian stochastic dynamics of the principal system under continuous-measurement. The system of equations determine the reduced conditional state of the principal only and may be viewed as a stochastic Nakajima-Zwanzig type of equation for continuously monitored non-Markovian quantum systems.