Abstract.We find an upper bound for geodesic distances associated to monotone Riemannian metrics on positive definite matrices and density matrices. 1.
Density matrices are fundamental mathematical objects for describing quantum states, and their set can be viewed as a subset of the manifold of symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices. Based on the Riemannian geometric structure on the SPD manifold, this paper analyzes geometric paths and distance functions on the space of density matrices. We adopt the affine-invariant Riemannian metric and review the associated geodesics and Riemannian distance, comparing them with linear interpolation and the Frobenius distance defined in the ambient Euclidean space. Numerical experiments are conducted to visualize geodesic paths between density matrices and to quantitatively compare several commonly used matrix distances, including the Frobenius, Riemannian, and Bures distances. The results demonstrate that distances induced by different geometric structures exhibit fundamentally different behaviors in characterizing discrepancies between density matrices, reflecting the intrinsic non-Euclidean geometry of the space. These analyses and numerical results provide a coherent geometric perspective for understanding the structure and similarity of density matrices.
The quantum analog of the Fisher information metric of a probability simplex is searched and several Riemannian metrics on the set of positive definite density matrices are studied. Some of them appeared in the literature in connection with Cramér–Rao-type inequalities or the generalization of the Berry phase to mixed states. They are shown to be stochastically monotone here. All stochastically monotone Riemannian metrics are characterized by means of operator monotone functions and it is proven that there exist a maximal and a minimal among them. A class of metrics can be extended to pure states and a constant multiple of the Fubini–Study metric appears in the extension.