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Infinite Dimensional Analysis Quantum Probability and Related Topics

COMPLEMENTARITY AND THE ALGEBRAIC STRUCTURE OF FOUR-LEVEL QUANTUM SYSTEMS

Dėnes Petz, András Szántó, Mihály Weiner

Published Mar 1, 2009• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The history of complementary observables and mutual unbiased bases is shortly reviewed. A characterization is given in terms of conditional entropy of subalgebras due to Connes and Størmer. The extension of complementarity to noncommutative subalgebras is considered as well. Possible complementary decompositions of a four-level quantum system are described and a characterization of the Bell basis is obtained: The MASA generated by the Bell basis is complementary to both M2(ℂ) tensor factors.

DOI
10.1142/s0219025709003598

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The history of complementary observables and mutual unbiased bases is shortly reviewed. A characterization is given in terms of conditional entropy of subalgebras due to Connes and Størmer. The extension of complementarity to noncommutative subalgebras is considered as well. Possible complementary decompositions of a four-level quantum system are described and a characterization of the Bell basis is obtained: The MASA generated by the Bell basis is complementary to both M2(ℂ) tensor factors.
Abstract: Reduction of a state of a quantum system to a subsystem gives partial quantum information about the true state of the total system. Two subalgebras A1 and A2 of B(H) are called complementary if the traceless subspaces of A1 and A2 are orthogonal (with respect to the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product). When both subalgebras are maximal Abelian, then the concept reduces to complementary observables or mutually unbiased bases. In the paper several characterizations of complementary subalgebras are given in the general case and several examples are presented. For a 4-level quantum system, the structure of complementary subalgebras can be described very well, the Cartan decomposition of unitaries plays a role. It turns out that a measurement corresponding to the Bell basis is complementary to any local measurement of the two-qubit-system.
Observables in quantum mechanics are generally complementary, that is, they reveal mutually incompatible pieces of information about a given system. This property is not only a fundamental tenet of the quantum formalism, but also a key component in quantum cryptographic protocols. As such it has fuelled much research into finding sets of highly complementary observables. In its strongest form -- the one we consider in this work -- the information between complementary observables is not merely incompatible but mutually exclusive: maximal information about one observable implies no information about the other, and vice versa. Maximal sets of non-degenerate complementary observables are known to exist in systems of prime power dimension such as n-qubit systems. Here, we study complementarity of degenerate observables, specifically we prove that observables associated with the n-qubit Pauli group also exhibit complementarity under this restriction: first, we obtain a criterion for two such observables to be complementary and, second, we relate maximal sets of complementary observables with informational pure state complementarity equalities, further studied in two companion papers. Equivalently, these results can be formulated in terms of maximal complementary sets of (not necessarily maximal) Abelian subgroups of the Pauli group linking with (possibly coarse-grained) mutually unbiased bases. Finally, we prove that these complementarity sets entail strong entropic uncertainty relations.
Complementarity is a very old concept in quantum mechanics, however the rigorous definition is not so old. Complementarity of orthogonal bases can be formulated in terms of maximal Abelian algebras and this may lead to avoid commutativity of the subalgebras. In some sense this means that quantum information is treated instead of classical (measurement) information. The subject is to extend to the quantum case some features from the classical case. This includes construction of complementary subalgebras. The Bell basis has also some relation. Several open questions are discussed.
We show that the amount of complementarity that a quantum system can exhibit depends on which complementary properties one is considering. Consider a set of mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) which corresponds to the spectral decomposition of some maximally complementary properties: The perfect knowledge of one, i.e. the state of the system is one of the basis states, implies that all the others are completely unknown, namely the measurement of another property will find any of its possible outcomes with uniform probability. We show that, depending on which three of the MUBs we choose, a 5-dimensional system can have different degrees of complementarity, measured using the minimum over all the system states of the sum of the entropies and of the variances of the measurement outcomes related to the three chosen observables. This property was first found experimentally, and demonstrates that an experimental discovery can disclose quantum information effects.