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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Compatibility between agents as a tool for coarse-grained descriptions of quantum systems

Cristhiano Duarte

Published Jul 13, 2020• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Shedding a new light in the coarse-graining scenario, in this contribution we came up with different necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a well-defined coarse-grained state. For doing so, we had to break apart with the usual quantum channels perspective and assume a more decision-theoretical posture. Broadly speaking, we reinterpret the coarse-graining problem in the language of quantum state pooling, and by making an extensive use of the conditional quantum states toolkit, we have been able to derive more tangible conditions for the emergence of a compatible effective coarse-grained state.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8121/aba574

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Abstract Shedding a new light in the coarse-graining scenario, in this contribution we came up with different necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a well-defined coarse-grained state. For doing so, we had to break apart with the usual quantum channels perspective and assume a more decision-theoretical posture. Broadly speaking, we reinterpret the coarse-graining problem in the language of quantum state pooling, and by making an extensive use of the conditional quantum states toolkit, we have been able to derive more tangible conditions for the emergence of a compatible effective coarse-grained state.
Shedding a new light in the coarse-graining scenario, in this contribution we came up with different necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a well-defined coarse-grained state. For doing so, we had to break apart with the usual quantum channels perspective and assume a more decision-theoretical posture. Broadly speaking, we reinterpret the coarse-graining problem in the language of quantum state pooling, and by make an extensive use of the conditional quantum states toolkit we have been able to derive more tangible conditions for the emergence of a compatible, effective coarse-grained state.
Coarse-grained descriptions can be used to account for physical processes in which information is lost or not entirely accessible. In this paper, we start by proposing a connection between effective, coarse-grained descriptions of quantum dynamics and the quantum conditional states formalism. In doing so, we address necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of emergent dynamics from a subjective Bayesian point of view. Although our solution is (quasi-)optimal, the dynamics it determines are shown to be analytically limited -- it solves the problem in a state-by-state case. Due to this limitation, we then implement semidefinite programming techniques to investigate the existence of effective dynamics in four paradigmatic scenarios. The existence of such an effective dynamics motivates the introduction of a new robustness measure that quantifies how much noise can be added to a microscopic dynamics without compromising its compatibility with a given coarse-grained description. Finally, we also show how one can analytically determine a valid emergent description in several examples.
With the birth of quantum information science, many tools have been developed to deal with many-body quantum systems. Although a complete description of such systems is desirable, it will not always be possible to achieve this goal, as the complexity of such description tends to increase with the number of particles. It is thus crucial to build effective quantum theories aiming to understand how the description in one scale emerges from the description of a deeper scale. This contribution explores different mathematical tools to the study of emergent effective dynamics in scenarios where a system is subject to a unitary evolution and the coarse-grained description of it is given by a CPTP map taking the original system into an \emph{effective} Hilbert space of smaller dimension. We see that a well-defined effective dynamics can only be defined when some sort of matching between the underlying unitary and the coarse-graining map is satisfied. Our main goal is to use these different tools to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for this matching in the general case.
A model of a quantum measurement process is presented: a system consisting of a qubit in a superposition interacts with a measuring apparatus consisting of a NNN qubit state. Looking at the emerging, effective description of the apparatus given by the action of a coarse-graining channel, we have been able to recover information about the superposition coefficients of the system. We have also been able to visualize the death of quantum correlations between system and apparatus and the death of quantum coherences in the apparatus' effective state, in the limit of a strong coarse-graining action---a situation akin to decoherence, although it is not necessary to evoke any interaction with the surrounding environment.
Quantum systems governed by unitary and reversible microscopic dynamics may nevertheless exhibit equilibration, in the sense that some effective description becomes time-independent. Standard equilibration results usually consider two separate situations: system-environment structures, in which the composite system evolves unitarily while the system of interest equilibrates, and restricted measurements, such as coarse-grained POVMs and observables, in which the measurement statistics equilibrate. Here, we bring these descriptions into a common state-level framework using the concept of generalized subsystems, where the accessible effective state appears as the output of a quantum channel acting on the microscopic state. We derive bounds showing that generalized subsystems equilibrate when their dimension is small compared with the effective dimension of the discarded microscopic information. We further show that this condition is met for typical initial states in large subspaces and that the resulting equilibrium description is largely insensitive to microscopic initial details. The framework recovers the usual equilibration bounds for ordinary subsystems and finite families of POVMs. As an example, we also introduce a finite-resolution energy channel that maps unresolved microscopic energy levels into effective energy levels, thereby making residual effective coherences explicit and showing how spectral multiplicities constrain those coherences while strengthening equilibration. Our results provide a unified state-level formulation of quantum equilibration under general forms of limited accessible information.
In approaches to quantum theory in which the quantum state is regarded as a representation of knowledge, information, or belief, two agents can assign different states to the same quantum system. This raises two questions: when are such state assignments compatible? And how should the state assignments of different agents be reconciled? In this paper, we address these questions from the perspective of the recently developed conditional states formalism for quantum theory (Leifer M S and Spekkens R W 2013 Phys. Rev. A 88 052310). Specifically, we derive a compatibility criterion proposed by Brun, Finkelstein and Mermin from the requirement that, upon acquiring data, agents should update their states using a quantum generalization of Bayesian conditioning. We provide two alternative arguments for this criterion, based on the objective and subjective Bayesian interpretations of probability theory. We then apply the same methodology to the problem of quantum state improvement, i.e. how to update your state when you learn someone else's state assignment, and to quantum state pooling, i.e. how to combine the state assignments of several agents into a single assignment that accurately represents the views of the group. In particular, we derive a pooling rule previously proposed by Spekkens and Wiseman under much weaker assumptions than those made in the original derivation. All of our results apply to a much broader class of experimental scenarios than have been considered previously in this context.