Quantum systems which interact with an unknown environment cannot be described in terms of a unitary evolution on the system alone. For such evolution one can use a map from one density operator to another and use any other known information to model the system. Such maps are required to be positive (at least on their domain) — they take positive density operators to positive density operators — so as to be physically reasonable. A map [Formula: see text] which is positive but not completely positive (CP) is one which takes positive operators to positive operators, but when extended by the identity [Formula: see text], i.e. [Formula: see text] does not give a positive map for some [Formula: see text]. The map is CP if and only if the extension is positive for all [Formula: see text]. Recently some effort has been put forth to try to understand if, and/or, under what circumstances one might utilize a non-CP map. Here, after a tutorial-type introduction to maps from one density operator to another, some examples which do not fit the standard prescription (SP) for deriving a CP map are given. In cases where the physical system is constrained by some knowledge of the interaction, it is possible that the SP cannot be used directly. Our example is robust to changes in the initial and final conditions.
The title may be a bit misleading. Perhaps, "On the Complete Positivity of Reduced Quantum Dynamics," would be a more fitting title. Determining whether or not completely positive (CP) maps are required to describe open system quantum dynamics is an extremely important issue concerning the fundamental mathematical foundations of QM, as well as many other areas of physics. it had been typically believed that only CP maps actually describe the dynamical evolution of open quantum systems, however there has been speculation as to whether this is a strict constraint on the mathematical and physical structure of stochastic quantum dynamical maps. The objective of this thesis is to demonstrate that given a particular unitary operator, an initial system state, a final system state, and the dimension of the environment state, there exists no CP map with a composite system-environment, product initial state that is compatible with the given constraints on the reduced quantum dynamics of the system under investigation.
Abstract In open quantum systems, it is known that if the system and environment are in a product state, the evolution of the system is given by a linear completely positive (CP) Hermitian map. CP maps are a subset of general linear Hermitian maps, which also include non completely positive (NCP) maps. NCP maps can arise in evolutions such as non-Markovian evolution, where the CP divisibility of the map (writing the overall evolution as a composition of CP maps) usually fails. Positive but NCP maps are also useful as entanglement witnesses. In this paper, we focus on transforming an initial NCP map to a CP map through composition with the asymmetric depolarizing map. We use separate asymmetric depolarizing maps acting on the individual subsystems. Previous work have looked at structural physical approximation (SPA), which is a CP approximation of an NCP map using a mixture of the NCP map with a completely depolarizing map. We prove that the composition can always be made CP without completely depolarizing in any direction. It is possible to depolarize less in some directions. We give the general proof by using the Choi matrix and an isomorphism from a maximally entangled two qudit state to a set of qubits. We also give measures that describe the amount of disturbance the depolarization introduces to the original map. Given our measures, we show that asymmetric depolarization has many advantages over SPA in preserving the structure of the original NCP map. Finally, we give some examples. For some measures and examples, completely depolarizing (while not necessary) in some directions can give a better approximation than keeping the depolarizing parameters bounded by the required depolarization if symmetric depolarization is used.
We investigate the evolution of open quantum systems in the presence of initial correlations with an environment. Here the standard formalism of describing evolution by completely positive trace preserving (CPTP) quantum operations can fail and non-completely positive (non-CP) maps may be observed. A new classification of correlations between a system and environment using quantum discord is explored. However, we find quantum discord is not a symmetric quantity between exchange of systems and this leads to ambiguity in classifications - states which are both quantum and classically correlated depending on the order of the two systems. State preparation in quantum process tomography is investigated with regard to non-CP maps. In SQPT the preparation procedure can influence the complete-positivity of the reconstructed quantum operation if our system is initially correlated with an environment. We examine a recently proposed preparation procedures using projective measurements, and propose our own protocol that uses a single measurement followed by unitary rotations. The former can give rise to non-CP evolution while the later will always give rise to a CP map. State preparation in AAPT was found always to give rise to CP evolution. We examine the effect of statistical noise in process tomography and find it can result in the identification of a non-CP when the evolution should be CP. The variance of the distribution for reconstructed processes is found to be inversely proportional to the number of copies of a state used to perform tomography. Finally, we detail an experiment using currently available linear optics QC devices to demonstrate non-CP maps arising in SQPT.
In the simplest approximation, the reduced dynamics of a quantum system
S interacting with its environment
E is considered to be given by a completely positive map. But, in general, this is not the case. In fact, the reduced dynamics of the system in not even linear, in general. Whether the reduced dynamics is linear or not is determined by two factors: the set of possible initial states of the system-environment $\mathcal{S}=\left\lbrace ρ_{SE} \right\rbrace $, and the joint system-environment unitary evolution
U. When
U is factorisable as
U=US⊗UE, then we can choose
S=D, where
D is the set of all system-environment density operators. In other words, when
U is factorisable, the reduced dynamics of the system
S is linear (in fact unitary) for arbitrary initial state of the system-environment
ρSE. We show that this result cannot be generalized to any non-factorisable
U: For any non-factorisable unitary evolution of the whole system-environment
U, the set
S must be chosen as a proper subset of
D to achieve linear reduced dynamics. As a byproduct, considering a convex set of possible initial states of the system-environment
S such that
TrE S=TrE D, we show that when the reduced dynamics of the system, for one system-environment unitary evolution
U1, is positive, but not completely positive, this implies that reduced dynamics is not linear for another
U2.
There has been a long-standing and sometimes passionate debate between physicists over whether a dynamical framework for quantum systems should incorporate not completely positive (NCP) maps in addition to completely positive (CP) maps. Despite the reasonableness of the arguments for complete positivity, we argue that NCP maps should be allowed, with a qualification: these should be understood, not as reflecting ‘not completely positive’ evolution, but as linear extensions, to a system’s entire state space, of CP maps that are only partially defined. Beyond the domain of definition of a partial-CP map, we argue, much may be permitted.
The common wisdom in the field of quantum information theory is that when a system is initially correlated with its environment, the map describing its evolution may fail to be completely positive. If true, this would have practical and foundational significance. We here demonstrate, however, that the common wisdom is mistaken. We trace the error to the standard proposal for how the evolution map ought to be defined. We summarize this standard proposal and then show that it sometimes fails to define a linear map or any map at all. Further, we show that these pathologies persist even in completely classical examples. Drawing inspiration from the framework of classical causal models, we argue that the correct definition of the evolution map is obtained by considering a counterfactual scenario wherein the system is reprepared independently of any systems in its causal past while the rest of the circuit remains the same, yielding a map that is always completely positive. In a postmortem of the standard proposal, we highlight two distinct mistakes that retrospectively become evident (in its application to completely classical examples): (i) The types of constraints to which it appealed are constraints on what one can infer about the final state of a system based on its initial state; however, such inferences reflect not just the cause-effect relation between them---which is the basis for defining the correct evolution map---but also the common-cause relation. (ii) In a (retrospectively unnecessary) attempt to introduce variability in the input state, it inadvertently introduced variability in the inference map itself, and then tried to fit the input-output pairs associated to these different maps with a single map.