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Quantum state retrodiction

Adam Nicholas. Hegarty, Seth Merkel

Published Jan 1, 2003• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

This project studies problem of quantum state retrodiction, which is concerned with determining the state of a quantum system at some time in the past on the basis of measurements made on it later. The problem is studied for quantum systems of two and four degrees of freedom, and an application of the latter solution is made to a modified version of the game Mastermind.

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This project studies problem of quantum state retrodiction, which is concerned with determining the state of a quantum system at some time in the past on the basis of measurements made on it later. The problem is studied for quantum systems of two and four degrees of freedom, and an application of the latter solution is made to a modified version of the game Mastermind.
Prediction, of course, is the making of statements about the likelihood of future events. retrodiction (or postdiction) is the making of statement about past events. In these lectures we shall study the rules governing retrodictive probabilities both in the quantum and classical domains. In doing so we develop a powerful tool with which to interpret physical phenomena and both analyse and interpret experiments. We use retrodictive methods to analyze a number of phenomena in quantum optics including the familiar photon antibunching, entanglement and ghost imaging and the perhaps less familiar ideas of quantum scissors, quantum computation in the past a single-particle analysis of two-particle interference. Quantum retrodiction is a quantitative theory and the familiar techniques for evolving quantum states and modelling open systems are applicable to retrodictive problems, but only with the introduction of some novel features. We conclude with a few remarks on more philosophical issues related to the arrow of time and wavefunction "collapse" in the measurement process. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The problem of retrodiction is associated with basic questions, but for this very reason it is, unfortunately, quite difficult, even in classical physics. In quantum physics it is even more subtle. In quantum mechanics, a consistent definition of what is called a "system" leads to problems that do not exist in classical physics, and correspondingly the answers to the questions raised are less straightforward. This chapter discusses the conditions under which it is possible to speak of an "independent time evolution" of a system S and to study what kinds of predictions can legitimately be made when these conditions are fulfilled. It describes retroactive computation to investigate whether or not the assumed knowledge in question is really consistent with the standard quantum mechanical formalism. The concept of retrodiction is related to the notions of time reversal and of irreversibility. Both these notions play a central role in physics.
Quantum retrodiction involves finding the probabilities for various preparation events given a measurement event. This theory has been studied for some time but mainly as an interesting concept associated with time asymmetry in quantum mechanics. Recent interest in quantum communications and cryptography, however, has provided retrodiction with a potential practical application. For this purpose quantum retrodiction in open systems should be more relevant than in closed systems isolated from the environment. In this paper we study retrodiction in open systems and develop a general master equation for the backward time evolution of the measured state, which can be used for calculating preparation probabilities. We solve the master equation, by way of example, for the driven two-level atom coupled to the electromagnetic field.
From the 1970s up to now, Mastermind, a classic two-player game, has attracted plenty of attention, not only from the public as a popular game, but also from the academic community as a scientific issue. Mastermind with n positions and k colors is formally described as: the codemaker privately chooses a secret s∈[k]ns\in [k]^ns∈[k]n, and the coderbreaker want to determine sss in as few queries like fs(x)f_s(x)fs​(x) as possible to the codemaker, where fs(x)f_s(x)fs​(x) indicates how x is close to s. The complexity of a strategy is measured by the number of queries used. In this work we study playing Mastermind on quantum computers in both non-adaptive and adaptive settings, obtaining efficient quantum algorithms which are all exact (i.e., return the correct result with certainty) and show huge quantum speedups. Technically, we develop a three-step framework for designing quantum algorithms for the general string learning problem, which not only allows huge quantum speedups on playing Mastermind, but also may shed light on exploring quantum speedups for other string learning problems.
We address the problem of choosing an initial state and final measurement that enable maximal retrodiction of the result of an unknown intermediate spin measurement of a spin-(1/2 particle, along any one of a given set of directions. Details are given of the derivation of the most general possible solution of the problem, which we reported recently. The maximal retrodiction is shown to be the determination of the result of the intermediate spin measurement, along any of four different directions that span three-dimensional space and satisfy a specific linear relation.