We investigate questions in quantum information geometry which concern the existence and nonexistence of dual and dually flat structures on stratified sets of density operators on finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. We show that the set of density operators of a given rank admits dually flat connections for which one connection is complete if and only if this rank is maximal. We prove, moreover, that there is never a dually flat structure on the set of pure states. Thus any general theory of quantum information geometry that involves duality concepts must inevitably be based on dual structures which are nonflat.
A Riemannian metric is defined on the state space of a finite quantum system by the canonical correlation (or Kubo–Mori/Bogoliubov scalar product). This metric is infinitesimally induced by the (nonsymmetric) relative entropy functional or the von Neumann entropy of density matrices. Hence its geometry expresses maximal uncertainty. It is proven that the metric is monotone under stochastic mappings, however, an example shows that it is not the only such Riemannian metric. This fact is remarkable because in the probabilistic case, the Markovian monotonicity property characterizes the Fisher information metric. The essential difference appears in the curvatures of a classical state space and a quantum one. A conjecture is made that the scalar curvature is monotone with respect to the ‘‘more mixed’’ (statistical) partial order of density matrices. Furthermore, an information inequality resembling the Cramér–Rao inequality of classical statistics is established. The inequality provides a lower bound for the canonical correlation matrix (of an unbiased observable) and it is saturated when a (partial) observation level and the corresponding family of coarse-grained states are considered.
Let [Formula: see text] be a separable Hilbert space. We consider the manifold [Formula: see text] consisting of density operators ρ on [Formula: see text] such that ρp is of trace class for some p ɛ (0, 1). We say [Formula: see text] is nearby ρ if there exists C > 1 such that C−1 ρ < σ < Cρ. We show that the space of nearby points to ρ can be furnished with the two flat connections known as the (±)-affine structures, which are dual relative to the BKM metric. We furnish [Formula: see text] with a norm making it into a Banach manifold.
We develop a GNS-based construction of geometric tensors on smooth parametric statistical models over
C∗-algebras. Since the state space of a
C∗-algebra is generally not a smooth manifold, the construction does not rely on pulling back tensors from an ambient state manifold. Instead, the GNS Hilbert spaces and their duals are organized into non-locally-trivial Hilbert fibrations over the state space. For models satisfying a compatibility condition expressing derivatives of expectation values as continuous functionals on the realified GNS fibers, each tangent vector admits a canonical dual GNS representative. Pulling back the dual GNS Hermitian product along the corresponding canonical lift produces a Hermitian tensor
K on the complexified tangent bundle of the model, whose real and imaginary parts define, under suitable regularity assumptions, a smooth weak Riemannian metric tensor
G and a smooth two-form
Ω. In finite-dimensional parameter manifolds the metric is, of course, strong. The construction recovers the Fisher--Rao metric in the commutative dominated case, the Fubini--Study geometry for pure states up to the normalization and sign convention imposed by the dual GNS pairing, and the SLD metric for faithful quantum states. In finite-dimensional faithful models, the two-form
Ω is proportional, up to convention, to the expected commutator of the SLD representatives, equivalently to the mean Uhlmann curvature. We show through faithful qubits and displaced thermal states that
Ω need not be closed. For bundle-regular models, the associated fiberwise symplectic form on the real dual GNS bundle admits connection-dependent closed extensions to the total space, while closedness of
Ω on the parameter manifold is controlled by the covariant exterior derivative of the canonical real dual GNS lift.
Abstract Our purpose here is to draw attention to an interesting relationship that can be shown to hold between (a) information geometry, and (b) quantum geometry. By ‘information geometry’, we mean the natural geometry associated with families of probability distributions. This is a subject that goes back more than half a century to the pioneering work of Rao (1945), who showed that the Fisher information matrix associated with a parametrised family of probability dis tributions gives rise to a natural Riemannian metric on the parameter space. This then allows one to speak in a precise way of the ‘distance’ between two probability distributions, an idea that turns out to be useful in problems of statistical inference. An extensive literature has thus developed, following this line of enquiry, on applications of differential geometry to statistics (see, e.g., Amari (1985), Barndorff-Nielsen et al. (1986), Murray and Rice (1993)). By ‘quantum geometry’, on the other hand, we mean the geometry of the manifold of states associated with a given quantum mechanical system. In particular, we consider the manifold of ‘pure’ states associated with a given complex Hilbert space. This is the space of ‘rays’ through the origin in the Hilbert space, which has the structure of a complex projective space. It is known that the usual rules of quantum mechanics allow one to construct a natural metric on this space, namely the Fubini-Study metric, the specification of which is equivalent to all the familiar structure associated with ordinary quantum mechanics.