Symmetry principles have played a crucial role in the development of modern physics and underpin our most fundamental theories of nature. The present thesis is concerned with the analysis of symmetries in the context of quantum information theory. Whenever a quantum mechanical system interacts with its environment it is subjected to decoherence, a process that is typically irreversible and most generally treated abstractly using the concept of quantum operations. If there is an underlying symmetry principle, additional structures emerge. The central question we address is, What are the consequences of global or local gauge symmetry on the structure of many-body quantum processes?This leads us to a diagrammatic framework of decomposing quantum operations into terms that respond to the symmetry principle in particular ways and respect the causal structures involved. We present two core applications. First, we address the interplay between irreversibility and repeatable use of coherent resources under symmetry constraints. Second, we give an information-theoretic perspective on gauging globally symmetric dynamics to a local symmetry applicable even in the presence of irreversibility and thus it goes beyond the usual Lagrangian formulation. Finally, we analyse the departure from conservation laws under symmetric dynamics subject to decoherence.
Symmetry principles have played a crucial role in the development of modern physics and underpin our most fundamental theories of nature. The present thesis is concerned with the analysis of symmetries in the context of quantum information theory. Whenever a quantum mechanical system interacts with its environment it is subjected to decoherence, a process that is typically irreversible and most generally treated abstractly using the concept of quantum operations. If there is an underlying symmetry principle, additional structures emerge. The central question we address is, What are the consequences of global or local gauge symmetry on the structure of many-body quantum processes?This leads us to a diagrammatic framework of decomposing quantum operations into terms that respond to the symmetry principle in particular ways and respect the causal structures involved. We present two core applications. First, we address the interplay between irreversibility and repeatable use of coherent resources under symmetry constraints. Second, we give an information-theoretic perspective on gauging globally symmetric dynamics to a local symmetry applicable even in the presence of irreversibility and thus it goes beyond the usual Lagrangian formulation. Finally, we analyse the departure from conservation laws under symmetric dynamics subject to decoherence.
Symmetry, irreversibility, and quantum coherence are foundational concepts in physics. Here, we present a universal tradeoff relation between these three concepts. This particularly reveals that (1) under a global symmetry, any attempt to change the local conserved charge causes inevitable irreversibility, and (2) such irreversibility can be mitigated by quantum coherence. Our tradeoff relation follows solely from the unitarity and global symmetry of the total dynamics, allowing for general applicability. For non-equilibrium physics, it relates the coherence cost and the entropy production -- representing thermodynamic irreversibility -- in arbitrary quantum processes. It also provides fundamental limitations on the capability of a number of quantum information processing tasks -- such as gate and measurement implementation and error correction -- that involve symmetry restrictions. Furthermore, it predicts how many bits of classical information thrown into a black hole become unreadable under energy conservation. Our tradeoff relation is based on quantum uncertainty relation, showcasing intimate connections between fundamental physical principles and ultimate operational capability of quantum processes.
While Bohr's complementarity principle constitutes a bedrock of quantum mechanics with profound implications, coherence, as a defining feature of the quantum realm originating from the superposition principle, pervades almost every quantum consideration. By exploiting the algebraic and geometric structure of state-channel interaction, we show that an information-theoretic measure of coherence and a quantitative symmetry-asymmetry complementarity emerge naturally from the formalism of quantum mechanics. This is achieved by decomposing the state-channel interaction into a symmetric part and an asymmetric part, which satisfy a conservation relation. The symmetric part is represented by the symmetric Jordan product, and the asymmetric part is synthesized by the skew-symmetric Lie product. The latter further leads to a significant extension of the celebrated Wigner--Yanase skew information, and has an operational interpretation as quantum coherence of a state with respect to a channel. This not only presents a basic and alternative framework for addressing complementarity, but also puts the study of coherence in a broad context involving channels. Fundamental properties of the symmetry-asymmetry complementarity are revealed, and applications and implications are illustrated via several prototypical channels as well as the Mach--Zehnder interferometry, in which the fringe visibility is linked to symmetry and the which-path is linked to asymmetry.
The first half of this thesis is dedicated to the study of generalizations of probability theory which include quantum theory and many of its alternatives. This research program seeks to understand quantum theory by exploring it ‘from the outside’, where it sits within a landscape of all operationally defined theories. We approach this problem with a new perspective: generalized decoherence. Quantum theory recovers classical theory via decoherence, where a ‘classical limit’ is achieved by a quantum system interacting with its environment, losing its quantum coherence. Typically it is the emergence of the classical world from the quantum that is studied. We reverse this paradigm and ask - how does the existence of a classical limit define the structure of quantum theory, or any other post-classical theory? We derive the existence of entangled states as a necessary feature of any theory that allows for the emergence of the classical world in this way. We then use our framework for generalized decoherence to explore the properties of theories that can ‘hyperdecohere’ to quantum theory. We find that any such theory must be very exotic compared to quantum theory, violating either the postulate of tomographic locality, reversibility, causality or purity. In the second half of this thesis we turn our attention to the second law of thermodynamics. We present a framework for deriving the second law under general constraints and explore two pertinent examples, constraining the fluctuations in work and constraining the size of the thermal bath and deriving the second law in these cases. Bounding fluctuations results in a unified free energy that contains the single-shot and Helmholtz free energies as limiting cases. Bounding the size of the thermal bath results in a finite-bath second law that is more general that previous attempts and draws connections between non-asymptotic thermodynamics and second-order information theory.
A useful and unifying concept in quantum information theory is the idea of a consumable "resource". The basic idea behind quantum resource theories is that whenever we face restrictions on the set of operations we can perform, some states (resource states) enable us to perform particular tasks that otherwise would have been impossible. In this thesis we first review a resource theory that recently has gained a lot of attention, namely the resource theory of asymmetry in which one is restricted to symmetric operations and therefore asymmetric states are the resource states. The asymmetry properties of a state relative to some symmetry group specify how and to what extent the given symmetry is broken by the state. In the remainder of the thesis we explain how the ideas developed in this resource theory are related to three different areas in quantum theory: theory of quantum reference frames, the Wigner-Araki-Yanase(WAY) theorem and the conditional probability interpretation of time in quantum mechanics. Theory of quantum reference frames treats reference frames like any other physical system within the formalism of quantum theory, which causes the measurements to be an approximation of the measurements against their classical counterparts. We consider the dynamics of a quantum directional reference frame undergoing repeated interactions. These interactions induce a back-action on the reference which is the central focus of our study. The effect of a precise sequence of measurement outcomes on the reference frame is studied by looking at both the case that the measurement record is averaged over and the case wherein it is retained. We find, in particular, that there is interesting dynamics in the latter situation, which cannot be revealed by considering the average case. We then consider in detail how a sequence of rotationally invariant unitary interactions affects the reference frame, a situation, which leads to quite different dynamics than the case of repeated measurements. Different strategies for correcting reference frame drift is considered given that we have access to a set of particles with polarization opposite to the direction of drift. In particular, we find that, by implementing a suitably chosen unitary interaction after every two measurements, we can eliminate the rotational drift of the reference frame. The WAY theorem establishes an important constraint that conservation laws impose on quantum mechanical measurements. We formulate the WAY theorem in the broader context of resource theories, where one is constrained to a subset of quantum mechanical operations described by a symmetry group. Establishing connections with the theory of quantum state discrimination we obtain optimal unitaries describing the measurement of arbitrary observables, explain how prior information can permit perfect measurements that circumvent the WAY constraint, and provide a framework that establishes a natural ordering on measurement apparatuses through a decomposition into asymmetry and charge subsystems. Finally we review two di erent schemes in the conditional probability interpretation (CPI) of time in quantum mechanics. In these schemes parameter time "t" as it appears in Schrodinder equation is considered to be unobservable, yet one can use an extension of conditional probabilities in order to study dynamics of a system relative to another system, namely the quantum clock. We phrase CPI as a quantum communication protocol which enables us to use the machinery developed in the resource theory of asymmetry. This provides us with a deeper understanding of the decoherence effect caused due to the inaccessibility of the parameter time "t" and that how this effect can be suppressed by choosing an optimal initial state for the quantum clock.
Both conservation laws and practical restrictions impose symmetry constraints on the dynamics of open quantum systems. In the case of time-translation symmetry, which arises naturally in many physically relevant scenarios, the quantum coherence between energy eigenstates becomes a valuable resource for quantum information processing. In this work, we identify the minimum amount of decoherence compatible with this symmetry for a given population dynamics. This yields a generalization to higher-dimensional systems of the relation ${T}_{2}\ensuremath{\le}2{T}_{1}$ for qubit decoherence and relaxation times. It also enables us to witness and assess the role of non-Markovianity as a resource for coherence preservation and transfer. Moreover, we discuss the relationship between ergodicity and the ability of Markovian dynamics to indefinitely sustain a superposition of different energy states. Finally, we establish a formal connection between the resource-theoretic and the master equation approaches to thermodynamics, with the former being a non-Markovian generalization of the latter. Our work thus brings the abstract study of quantum coherence as a resource towards the realm of actual physical applications.
Dynamical symmetries in closed systems lead to conservation laws and to selection rules that are based on those conservation laws. However, conservation laws are not applica- ble to open systems that undergo irreversible transformations. More general selection rules are needed to determine whether, given two states, the transition from one state to the other is possible. Characterizing the asymmetry properties of quantum states using quantum information theoretical tools and methods is particularly fruitful for this purpose. This thesis is concerned with the problem of finding new general selection rules that hold for both open and closed systems. The usual approach to this problem relies heavily on group theory and involves a detailed study of the structure of the symmetry group. In this thesis, we approach the problem in a completely new way. Our approach is to use entanglement to investigate the asymmetry properties of quantum states. In order to do that, we embed the system’s Hilbert space in a larger tensor product Hilbert space, whereby all symmetric states are mapped to separable states, asymmetric states are mapped to entangled states, and the symmetric transformations between two states are replaced by local operations on their bipartite images. Our method is not restricted to only a specific group but applies, in general, to all symmetries that are associated with semi-simple compact Lie groups and their associated Lie algebras. The mapping of the original states to bipartite states that act on the larger Hilbert space enables us to use the well studied theory of entanglement to investigate the consequences of dynamic symmetries. For example, the monotonicity condition on measures of entanglement provide us with new selection rules. Under reversible transfor- mations, the entanglement of the bipartite image states becomes a conserved quantity. These entanglement-based conserved quantities are new and different from the conserved quantities based on expectation values of the Hamiltonian symmetry generators.