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Spectral Methods for quantum Markov chains

Oleg Szehr

Published Jan 1, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The aim of this project is to contribute to our understanding of quantum time evolutions, whereby we focus on quantum Markov chains. The latter constitute a natural generalization of the ubiquitous concept of a classical Markov chain to describe evolutions of quantum mechanical systems. We contribute to the theory of such processes by introducing novel methods that allow us to relate the eigenvalue spectrum of the transition map to convergence as well as stability properties of the Markov chain.

DOI
10.14288/1.0220654

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The aim of this project is to contribute to our understanding of quantum time evolutions, whereby we focus on quantum Markov chains. The latter constitute a natural generalization of the ubiquitous concept of a classical Markov chain to describe evolutions of quantum mechanical systems. We contribute to the theory of such processes by introducing novel methods that allow us to relate the eigenvalue spectrum of the transition map to convergence as well as stability properties of the Markov chain.
This thesis is the fruit of investigations on the extension of ideas of Markov chain mixing to the quantum setting, and its application to problems of dissipative engineering. A Markov chain describes a statistical process where the probability of future events depends only on the state of the system at the present point in time, but not on the history of events. Very many important processes in nature are of this type, therefore a good understanding of their behavior has turned out to be very fruitful for science. Markov chains always have a non-empty set of limiting distributions (stationary states). The aim of Markov chain mixing is to obtain (upper and/or lower) bounds on the number of steps it takes for the Markov chain to reach a stationary state. The natural quantum extensions of these notions are density matrices and quantum channels. We set out to develop a general mathematical framework for studying quantum Markov chain mixing. We introduce two new distance measures into the quantum setting; the quantum χ2divergence and Hilbert’s projective metric. The quantum χ2 divergence allows us to extend the class of functional techniques called Poincare inequalities to the quantum setting. In the process, we identify the appropriate framework for discussing notions such as detailed balance and χ2-mixing: monotone Riemannian metrics on matrix spaces. This insight allows us to characterize the connection between spectral properties of a (primitive) quantum channel and its mixing time. Within the same framework we also derive a restricted quantum version of the celebrated conductance bound (Cheeger’s inequality). We then consider Hilbert’s projective metric a well known tool in Perron-Frobenius theory in the context of quantum information theory. As a classic tool for analyzing convergence of positive maps on cones, Hilbert’s projective metric is especially good at providing existence proofs of maps between two spaces (or cones). We relate this measure to distinguishability measures on restricted cones of operators, and analyze the observable loss of information after the application of a quantum channel under a restrict set of measurements. Various notions of contractivity of quantum channels are revealed through Hilbert’s metric. Still on the topic of quantum Markov chains, we introduce the notion of cutoff phenomenon to the quantum setting. The cutoff phenomenon describes the situation when a Markov chain does not converge for a potentially long time, and then at a specific point in time abruptly converges to equilibrium. In the thermodynamic limit, the convergence profile will then look like a step function. We show that this type of convergence behavior occurs, as measured in trace-norm, when a system is subject to a product channel, and the noise on each product is modeled by a one-parameter semigroup of quantum channels. Finally, we consider three independent tasks of dissipative engineering. The first task, which is aimed at experimental realization in the near future, consists in dissipatively
This paper proposes a quantum algorithm for Markov chain spectral gap estimation that is quasi-optimal (i.e., optimal up to a polylogarithmic factor) in the number of vertices for all parameters, and additionally quasi-optimal in the reciprocal of the spectral gap itself, if the permitted relative error is above some critical value. In particular, these results constitute an almost quadratic advantage over the best-possible classical algorithm. Our algorithm also improves on the quantum state of the art, and we contend that this is not just theoretically interesting but also potentially practically impactful in real-world applications: knowing a Markov chain's spectral gap can speed-up sampling in Markov chain Monte Carlo. Our approach uses the quantum singular value transformation, and as a result we also develop some theory around block-encoding Markov chain transition matrices, which is potentially of independent interest. In particular, we introduce explicit block-encoding methods for the transition matrices of two algebraically-defined classes of Markov chains.
Motivated by a model presented by S. Gudder, we study a quantum generalization of Markov chains and discuss the relation between these maps and open quantum random walks, a class of quantum channels described by S. Attal et al. We consider processes which are nonhomogeneous in time, i.e., at each time step, a possibly distinct evolution kernel. Inspired by a spectral technique described by L. Saloff-Coste and J. Zúñiga, we define a notion of ergodicity for nonhomogeneous quantum Markov chains and describe a criterion for ergodicity of such objects in terms of singular values. As a consequence we obtain a quantum version of the classical probability result concerning the behavior of the columns (or rows) of the iterates of a stochastic matrix induced by a finite, irreducible, aperiodic Markov chain. We are also able to relate the ergodic property presented here with the notions of weak and uniform ergodicity known in the literature of noncommutative L1L^1L1-spaces.
We investigate the stability of quantum Markov processes with respect to perturbations of their transition maps. In the first part, we introduce a condition number that measures the sensitivity of fixed points of a quantum channel to perturbations. We establish upper and lower bounds on this condition number in terms of subdominant eigenvalues of the transition map. In the second part, we consider quantum Markov processes that converge to a unique stationary state and we analyze the stability of the evolution at finite times. In this way we obtain a linear relation between the mixing time of a quantum Markov process and the sensitivity of its fixed point with respect to perturbations of the transition map.