Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Conditional density matrix: subsystems in quantum communication
Vladimir Viktorovich Belokurov, Oleg Antonovich Khrustalev, Victor Antonovich Sadovnichy, O. D. Timofeevskaya
Abstract
A new quantum mechanical notion - Conditional Density Matrix - proposed by the authors, is discussed and is applied to describe some physical processes. This notion is a natural generalization of von Neumann density matrix for such processes as divisions of quantum systems into subsystems and reunifications of subsystems into new joint systems. Conditional Density Matrix assigns a quantum state to a subsystem of a composite system under condition that another part of the composition system is in some pure state. It is shown that conditional density matrix naturally arises by expanding of reduced density matrix.