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Journal of Optics B Quantum and Semiclassical Optics

The speed limit of quantum unitary evolution

Vittorio Giovannetti, Seth Lloyd, Lorenzo Maccone

Published Jul 28, 2004• 62 citations
Publisher

Abstract

How fast can a quantum system evolve? In this paper we study the relation between entanglement and the time it takes for a composite system to perform a given evolution. In particular, we analyse how the order of the interactions shapes the dynamics.
DOI
10.1088/1464-4266/6/8/028

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The time needed by a quantum system to reach a state fully distinguishable from the original one provides a natural way of determining how fast the corresponding dynamical evolution is. This orthogonality time admits a lower bound, expressible in terms of the energy's expectation value and the energy's standard deviation, that yields a 'quantum speed limit'. Composite quantum systems need entanglement in order to achieve this limit. So far, most studies on the connection between entanglement and the quantum speed limit have focused on the case of non-interacting systems. The connection between quantum speed and entanglement is systematically investigated here for the case of a system of two interacting qubits, taking into consideration all possible initial states that evolve into an orthogonal one.
Entanglement is closely related to some fundamental features of the dynamics of composite quantum systems: quantum entanglement enhances the "speed" of evolution of certain quantum states, as measured by the time required to reach an orthogonal state. The concept of "speed" of quantum evolution constitutes an important ingredient in any attempt to determine the fundamental limits that basic physical laws impose on how fast a physical system can process or transmit information. Here we explore the relationship between entanglement and the speed of quantum evolution in the context of the quantum brachistochrone problem. Given an initial and a final state of a composite system we consider the amount of entanglement associated with the brachistochrone evolution between those states, showing that entanglement is an essential resource to achieve the alluded time-optimal quantum evolution.
Quantum speed limits are relations yielding lower bounds on the evolution time of quantum systems. These results have been generalized in some ways, in particular by including evolutions to non-orthogonal states. However, there was a gap in the literature on this area, for only unitary evolutions -- closed quantum systems -- had been considered. On this Ph.D. thesis, such limitation is overcome: our main result is a bound for quantum-system evolutions in general, whether unitary or not, and correctly recovers the known bounds in the unitary case. Applications of this bound to several concrete cases of interest are herein presented. This bound is also used to extend to the non-unitary case the discussion of the role of entanglement in fast evolutions, leading to nontrivial results. For the derivation of the results, a geometric approach has been employed, which allows a clear interpretation of the bounds and a discussion of the criteria for their saturation. No previous knowledge of quantum-state geometry by the reader has been assumed.
The concept of quantum speed limit-time (QSL) was initially introduced as a lower bound to the time interval that a given initial state ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{I}$ may need so as to evolve into a state orthogonal to itself. Recently [V. Giovanetti, S. Lloyd, and L. Maccone, Phys. Rev. A 67, 052109 (2003)] this bound has been generalized to the case where ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{I}$ does not necessarily evolve into an orthogonal state, but into any other ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{F}$. It was pointed out that, for certain classes of states, quantum entanglement enhances the evolution ``speed'' of composite quantum systems. In this work we provide an exhaustive and systematic QSL study for pure and mixed states belonging to the whole 15-dimensional space of two qubits, with ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{F}$ a not necessarily orthogonal state to ${\ensuremath{\psi}}_{I}$. We display convincing evidence for a clear correlation between concurrence, on the one hand, and the speed of quantum evolution determined by the action of a rather general local Hamiltonian, on the other one.
There exists an interesting relationship between entanglement and the time evolution of composite quantum systems: quantum entanglement enhances the 'speed' of evolution of certain quantum states, as measured by the time needed to reach an orthogonal state. Previous research done on this subject has been focused upon comparing extreme cases (highly entangled states versus separable states) or upon bi-partite systems. In the present contribution we explore the aforementioned connection (between entanglement and time evolution) in the cases of two-qubits and N -qubits systems, taking into account states of intermediate entanglement. In particular, we investigate a family of energetically symmetric states of low entanglement that saturate the quantum speed bound. We show that, as the number of qubits increases, very little entanglement is needed to reach the quantum speed limit.