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Physical Review A

Informational distance on quantum-state space

Shunlong Luo, Qiang Zhang

Published Mar 16, 2004• 216 citations
Publisher

Abstract

By formally generalizing the classical Hellinger distance and affinity on the space of probability densities, we introduce their quantum analog on the quantum state space consisting of all density operators. We show that the infinitesimal form of the quantum Hellinger distance is the skew information introduced by Wigner and Yanase in 1963. We compare the Hellinger distance and affinity with the Bures distance and fidelity, and establish a variety of their fundamental properties. We further apply them to characterizing entanglement and to establishing some unusual uncertainty relations relating nonsimultaneous measurements of a single observable in two different quantum states.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.69.032106

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By formally generalizing the classical Hellinger distance and affinity on the space of probability densities, we introduce their quantum analog on the quantum state space consisting of all density operators. We show that the infinitesimal form of the quantum Hellinger distance is the skew information introduced by Wigner and Yanase in 1963. We compare the Hellinger distance and affinity with the Bures distance and fidelity, and establish a variety of their fundamental properties. We further apply them to characterizing entanglement and to establishing some unusual uncertainty relations relating nonsimultaneous measurements of a single observable in two different quantum states.
The Hellinger distance between quantum states is a significant measure in quantum information theory, known for its Riemannian and monotonic properties. It is easier to compute than the Bures distance, another measure that shares these properties, particularly in information-theoretic applications. Furthermore, in these applications, random quantum states are crucial for securing communication, studying entanglement, benchmarking quantum systems, aiding in quantum state tomography, and understanding how quantum systems behave in noisy environments. Recent works have computed exact results for distance measures such as Bures and Hilbert-Schmidt for random density matrices; however, no such results exist for the Hellinger distance. In this work, we derive the mean and variance of the Hellinger distance between pairs of density matrices, where one or both matrices are random. Our derivation utilizes Weingarten functions to perform the necessary unitary group integrals and is supported by existing results for eigenvalue moments of random density matrices. Along the way, we also obtain exact results for the mean affinity and mean square affinity. The first two cumulants of the Hellinger distance allow us to propose an approximation for the corresponding probability density function based on the gamma distribution. Our analytical results are corroborated through Monte Carlo simulations, showing excellent agreement.
Abstract In this work, we derive state-dependent uncertainty relations (uncertainty equalities) in which commutators of incompatible operators (not necessarily Hermitian) are explicitly present and state-independent uncertainty relations based on the Wigner-Yanase (-Dyson) skew information. We derive uncertainty equality based on standard deviation for incompatible operators with mixed states, a generalization of previous works in which only pure states were considered. We show that for pure states, the Wigner-Yanase skew information based state-independent uncertainty relations become standard deviation based state-independent uncertainty relations which turn out to be tighter uncertainty relations for some cases than the ones given in previous works, and we generalize the previous works for arbitrary operators. As the Wigner-Yanase skew information of a quantum channel can be considered as a measure of quantum coherence of a density operator with respect to that channel, we show that there exists a state-independent uncertainty relation for the coherence measures of the density operator with respect to a collection of different channels. We show that state-dependent and state-independent uncertainty relations based on a more general version of skew information called generalized skew information which includes the Wigner-Yanase (-Dyson) skew information and the Fisher information as special cases hold. In qubits, we derive tighter state-independent uncertainty inequalities for different form of generalized skew informations and standard deviations, and state-independent uncertainty equalities involving generalized skew informations and standard deviations of spin operators along three orthogonal directions. Finally, we provide a scheme to determine the Wigner-Yanase (-Dyson) skew information of an unknown observable which can be performed in experiment using the notion of weak values.
Abstract Non-Gaussianity is an important resource for quantum information processing with continuous variables. We introduce a measure of the non-Gaussianity of bosonic field states based on the Hellinger distance and present its basic features. This measure has some natural properties and is easy to compute. We illustrate this measure with typical examples of bosonic field states and compare it with various measures of non-Gaussianity. In particular, we highlight its similarity to and difference from the measure based on the Bures distance (or, equivalently, fidelity).
The uncertainty of a mixed state has two quite different origins: classical mixing and quantum randomness. While the classical aspect (mixedness) is significantly quantified by the von Neumann entropy, it seems that we still do not have a well accepted measure of quantum uncertainty. In terms of the skew information introduced by Wigner and Yanase in 1963 in the context of quantum measurements, we will propose an intrinsic measure for synthesizing quantum uncertainty of a mixed state and investigate its fundamental properties. We illustrate how it arises naturally from a naive hidden-variable approach to entanglement and how it exhibits a simple relation to the notion of negativity, which is an entanglement monotone introduced quite recently. We further show that it has a dramatic nonextensive feature resembling the probability law relating operations of two events. This measure of quantum uncertainty provides an alternative quantity complementary to the von Neumann entropy for studying mixedness and quantum correlations.
Abstract Uncertainty principle plays a vital role in quantum physics. The Wigner–Yanase skew information characterizes the uncertainty of an observable with respect to the measured state. We generalize the uncertainty relations for two quantum channels to arbitrary N quantum channels based on Wigner–Yanase skew information. We illustrate that these uncertainty inequalities are tighter than the existing ones by detailed examples. Especially, we also discuss the uncertainty relations for N unitary channels, which could be regarded as variance-based sum uncertainty relations with respect to any pure state.