6. Quantum Evolutions and Channels

Meng Li, Yun‐Feng Huang, Guang‐Can Guo

Abstract It was demonstrated that the entanglement evolution of a specially designed quantum state in the bistochastic channel is asymmetric. In this work, we generalize the study of the quantum correlations, including entanglement and quantum discord, evolution asymmetry to various quantum channels. We found that the asymmetry of entanglement and quantum discord only occurs in some special quantum channels, and the behavior of the entanglement evolution may be quite different from the behavior of the quantum discord evolution. To quantum entanglement, in some channels it decreases monotonously with the increase of the quantum channel intensity. In some other channels, when we increase the intensity of the quantum channel, it decreases at first, then keeps zero for some time, and then rises up. To quantum discord, the evolution becomes more complex and you may find that it evolutes unsmoothly at some points. These results illustrate the strong dependence of the quantum correlations evolution on the property of the quantum channels.

Kai Dong Xu, Guo‐Feng Zhang, Wu‐Ming Liu

The maximal evolution speed of a quantum system can be represented by quantum speed limit time (QSLT). We investigate the QSLT of a two-qubit system passing through a correlated channel (amplitude damping, phase damping, and depolarizing). By adjusting the correlation parameter of the channel and the initial entanglement, a method to accelerate the evolution speed of the system for some specific channels is proposed. It is shown that, in the amplitude damping channel and the depolarizing channel, QSLT may be shortened in some cases by increasing the correlation parameter of the channel and the initial entanglement, which are in sharp contrast to the phase damping channel. In particular, under depolarizing channels, the transition from no-speedup evolution to speedup evolution for the system can be realized by changing the correlation strength of the channel.

Michael M. Wolf, J. I. Cirac

We investigate the possibility of dividing quantum channels into concatenations of other channels, thereby studying the semigroup structure of the set of completely-positive trace-preserving maps. We show the existence of ‘ indivisible ’ channels which can not be written as non-trivial products of other channels and study the set of ‘ infinitesimal divisible ’ channels which are elements of continuous completely positive evolutions. For qubit channels we obtain a complete characterization of the sets of indivisible and infinitesimal divisible channels. Moreover, we identify those channels which are solutions of time-dependent master equations for both positive and completely positive evolutions. For arbitrary finite dimension we prove a representation theorem for elements of continuous completely positive evolutions based on new results on determinants of quantum channels and Markovian approximations.