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Physical Review A

Quantum coherence versus quantum uncertainty

Shunlong Luo, Yuan Sun

Published Aug 25, 2017• 140 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The notion of measurement is of both foundational and instrumental significance in quantum mechanics, and coherence destroyed by measurements (decoherence) lies at the very heart of quantum to classical transition. Qualitative aspects of this spirit have been widely recognized and analyzed ever since the inception of quantum theory. However, axiomatic and quantitative investigations of coherence are attracting great interest only recently with several figures of merit for coherence introduced [Baumgratz, Cramer, and Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)]. While these resource theoretic approaches have many appealing and intuitive features, they rely crucially on various notions of incoherent operations which are sophisticated, subtle, and not uniquely defined, as have been critically assessed [Chitambar and Gour, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 030401 (2016)]. In this paper, we elaborate on the idea that coherence and quantum uncertainty are dual viewpoints of the same quantum substrate, and address coherence quantification by identifying coherence of a state (with respect to a measurement) with quantum uncertainty of a measurement (with respect to a state). Consequently, coherence measures may be set into correspondence with measures of quantum uncertainty. In particular, we take average quantum Fisher information as a measure of quantum uncertainty, and introduce the corresponding measure of coherence, which is demonstrated to exhibit desirable properties. Implications for interpreting quantum purity as maximal coherence, and quantum discord as minimal coherence, are illustrated.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.022130

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The notion of measurement is of both foundational and instrumental significance in quantum mechanics, and coherence destroyed by measurements (decoherence) lies at the very heart of quantum to classical transition. Qualitative aspects of this spirit have been widely recognized and analyzed ever since the inception of quantum theory. However, axiomatic and quantitative investigations of coherence are attracting great interest only recently with several figures of merit for coherence introduced [Baumgratz, Cramer, and Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)]. While these resource theoretic approaches have many appealing and intuitive features, they rely crucially on various notions of incoherent operations which are sophisticated, subtle, and not uniquely defined, as have been critically assessed [Chitambar and Gour, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 030401 (2016)]. In this paper, we elaborate on the idea that coherence and quantum uncertainty are dual viewpoints of the same quantum substrate, and address coherence quantification by identifying coherence of a state (with respect to a measurement) with quantum uncertainty of a measurement (with respect to a state). Consequently, coherence measures may be set into correspondence with measures of quantum uncertainty. In particular, we take average quantum Fisher information as a measure of quantum uncertainty, and introduce the corresponding measure of coherence, which is demonstrated to exhibit desirable properties. Implications for interpreting quantum purity as maximal coherence, and quantum discord as minimal coherence, are illustrated.
Coherence of a quantum state (with respect to a fixed incoherent basis) is usually quantified by distancelike quantities, among which a particularly convenient and intuitive quantifier of coherence is based on the Hilbert-Schmidt distance between the quantum state and its dephased counterpart. This quantifier has a simple structure and many nice properties, although it is not a coherence monotone in the conventional resource-theoretic framework of coherence. Here we reveal its information-theoretic significance by showing that it coincides with uncertainty, as quantified by the variance of the state in the incoherent basis. The key point here is to regard the state as an observable, and to regard the incoherent basis as an ensemble of states rather than as measurement operators. Our result provides a natural decomposition of coherence into components along the incoherent basis. Furthermore, in terms of the Tsallis 2-entropy, which is also a measure of uncertainty, we provide two alternative interpretations of coherence: as increase of uncertainty caused by decoherence and as the conditional Tsallis 2-entropy in the context of purification. An intrinsic relation between the maximal coherence and the Brukner-Zeilinger invariant information is also established. These identifications of coherence with increase of uncertainty lead us to interpret coherence as a manifestation of quantum uncertainty, which may have implications for both quantum foundations and applications.
In quantum mechanics, quantum coherence of a state relative to a quantum measurement can be identified with the quantumness that has to be destroyed by the measurement. In particular, quantum coherence of a bipartite state relative to a local quantum measurement encodes quantum correlations in the state. If one takes minimization with respect to the local measurements, then one is led to quantifiers which capture quantum correlations from the perspective of coherence. In this vein, quantum discord, which quantifies the minimal correlations that have to be destroyed by quantum measurements, can be identified as the minimal coherence, with the coherence measured by the relative entropy of coherence. To advocate and formulate this idea in a general context, we first review coherence relative to Lüders measurements which extends the notion of coherence relative to von Neumann measurements (or equivalently, orthonomal bases), and highlight the observation that quantum discord arises as minimal coherence through two prototypical examples. Then, we introduce some novel measures of quantum correlations in terms of coherence, illustrate them through examples, investigate their fundamental properties and implications, and indicate their applications to quantum metrology.
Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the quantification of coherence or other coherencelike concepts within the framework of quantum resource theory. However, rigorously defined or not, the notion of coherence or decoherence has already been used by the community for decades since the advent of quantum theory. Intuitively, the definitions of coherence and decoherence should be two sides of the same coin. Therefore, a natural question is raised: How can the conventional decoherence processes, such as the von Neumann--L\"uders (projective) measurement postulation or partially dephasing channels, fit into the bigger picture of the recently established theoretical framework? Here we show that the state collapse rules of the von Neumann or L\"uders-type measurements, as special cases of genuinely incoherent operations (GIOs), are consistent with the resource theories of quantum coherence. New hierarchical measures of coherence are proposed for the L\"uders-type measurement and their relationship with measurement-dependent discord is addressed. Moreover, utilizing the fixed-point theory for C∗{C}^{*}C∗ algebra, we prove that GIOs indeed represent a particular type of partially dephasing (phase-damping) channels which have a matrix representation based on the Schur product. By virtue of the Stinespring dilation theorem, the physical realizations of incoherent operations are investigated in detail and we find that GIOs in fact constitute the core of strictly incoherent operations and generally incoherent operations and the unspeakable notion of coherence induced by GIOs can be transferred to the theories of speakable coherence by the corresponding permutation or relabeling operators.
Based on the theory of quantum mechanics, intrinsic randomness in measurement distinguishes quantum effects from classical ones. From the perspective of states, this quantum feature can be summarized as coherence or superposition in a specific (classical) computational basis. Recently, by regarding coherence as a physical resource, Baumgratz et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)] presented a comprehensive framework for coherence measures. Here, we propose a quantum coherence measure essentially using the intrinsic randomness of measurement. The proposed coherence measure provides an answer to the open question in completing the resource theory of coherence. Meanwhile, we show that the coherence distillation process can be treated as quantum extraction, which can be regarded as an equivalent process of classical random number extraction. From this viewpoint, the proposed coherence measure also clarifies the operational aspect of quantum coherence. Finally, our results indicate a strong similarity between two types of quantumness---coherence and entanglement.
Quantum Physics The notion that particles have properties of waves lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. When quantum systems interact, their interaction can be described in terms of interfering waves, whose coherence is of utmost importance in working out how these waves ultimately interfere. Determining how much coherence there is in a system or how much is required for a particular process is difficult to quantify, though. Baumgratz et al. present a rigorous mathematical framework for the quantification of coherence and identify intuitive and easily computable measures that can be used to compute it. They argue that having such a quantifiable metric will have important implications for describing energy transfer processes or transferring quantum information between quantum elements. Phys. Rev. Lett. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.140401 (2014).
As a direct consequence of the interplay between the superposition principle of quantum mechanics and the dynamics of open systems, decoherence is a recurring theme in both foundational and experimental exploration of the quantum realm. Decoherence is intimately related to information leakage of open systems and is usually formulated in the setup of "system + environment" as information acquisition of the environment (observer) from the system. As such, it has been mainly characterized via correlations (e.g., quantum mutual information, discord, and entanglement). Decoherence combined with redundant proliferation of the system information to multiple fragments of environment yields the scenario of quantum Darwinism, which is now a widely recognized framework for addressing the quantum-to-classical transition: the emergence of the apparent classical reality from the enigmatic quantum substrate. Despite the half-century development of the notion of decoherence, there are still many aspects awaiting investigations. In this work, we introduce two quantifiers of classicality via the Jordan product and uncertainty, respectively, and then employ them to quantify decoherence from an information-theoretic perspective. As a comparison, we also study the influence of the system on the environment.