Stochastic Processes - Quantum Physics

Sergio A Albeverio, Ph. Combe, M. Sirugue-Collin

Simon Milz, Kavan Kishore Modi

The field of classical stochastic processes forms a major branch of mathematics.Stochastic processes are, of course, also very well studied in biology, chemistry, ecology, geology, finance, physics, and many more fields of natural and social sciences.When it comes to quantum stochastic processes, however, the topic is plagued with pathological issues that have led to fierce debates amongst researchers.Recent developments have begun to untangle these issues and paved the way for generalizing the theory of classical stochastic processes to the quantum domain without ambiguities.This tutorial details the structure of quantum stochastic processes, in terms of the modern language of quantum combs, and is aimed at students in quantum physics and quantum-information theory.We begin with the basics of classical stochastic processes and generalize the same ideas to the quantum domain.Along the way, we discuss the subtle structure of quantum physics that has led to troubles in forming an overarching theory for quantum stochastic processes.We close the tutorial by laying out many exciting problems that lie ahead in this branch of science.

Aritro Mukherjee

Quantum stochastic processes are widely used in describing open quantum systems and in the context of quantum foundations. Physically relevant quantum stochastic processes driven by multiplicative colored noise are generically non-Markovian and analytically intractable. Further, their Markovian limits are generically inequivalent when using either the Ito or Stratonovich conventions for the same quantum stochastic processes. We introduce a quantum noise homogenization scheme that temporally coarse-grains non-Markovian, colored-noise-driven quantum stochastic processes and connects them to their effective white-noise (Markovian) limits. Our approach uses a novel phase-space augmentation that maps the non-Markovian dynamics into a higher-dimensional Markovian system and then applies a controlled perturbative coarse-graining scheme in the characteristic time scales of the noise. This allows an explicit analytical algorithm to derive effective Markovian generators with renormalized coefficients and enables various physical constraints, such as causality, to be imposed on them. We thus resolve the Ito--Stratonovich ambiguity for multiplicative colored-noise-driven quantum stochastic processes, wherein we show that their consistent Markovian limit corresponds to the Stratonovich convention with renormalized coefficients as well as correction terms in Ito's convention. By assuming their Markovian limit unravels causal, completely positive and trace-preserving dynamics, we further characterize a physically relevant family of non-Markovian quantum stochastic processes driven by multiplicative colored~noise.

Masao Nagasawa

"Stochastic Processes in Quantum Physics" addresses the question 'What is the mathematics needed for describing the movement of quantum particles', and shows that it is the theory of stochastic (in pa