Phase Operator

Juha-Pekka Pellonpää

We represent quantum phase observables as phase shift covariant normalized positive operator measures. The phase operators are the first moment operators of the phase observables. A phase operator determines the associated phase observable uniquely. We show that the Cahill–Glauber s -ordered phase operators are determined by phase shift covariant generalized operator measures, which are ordinary operator measures whenever Re s < 0 and phase observables when s ≤ −1. The Wigner–Weyl quantized phase operator is not determined by any phase observable. We investigate the classical limit of covariant (generalized) operator measures in coherent states.

G. M. Saxena

We define quantum phase in terms of inverses of annihilation and creation operators. We show that like Susskind - Glogower phase operators, the measured phase operators and the unitary phase operators can be defined in terms of the inverse operators. However, for the unitary phase operator the Hilbert space includes the negative energy states. The quantum phase in inverse operator representation may find the applications in the field of quantum optics particularly in the squeezed states.

Marian Grabowski

Anthony Wilkie, Igor Gaidai, James Ostrowski +1 more

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a promising quantum algorithm that can be used to approximately solve combinatorial optimization problems. The usual QAOA ansatz consists of an alternating application of the cost and mixer Hamiltonians. In this work, we study how using Hamiltonians other than the usual cost Hamiltonian, dubbed custom phase operators, can affect the performance of the QAOA. We derive an expected value formula for the QAOA with custom phase operators at $p=1$ and show numerically that some of these custom phase operators can achieve higher approximation ratios than the original algorithm implementation. Out of all the graphs tested at $p=1$, 0.036% of the random custom phase operators, 75.9% of the subgraph custom phase operators, 95.1% of the triangle-removed custom phase operators, and 93.9% of the maximal degree edge-removed custom phase operators have a higher approximation ratio than the original QAOA implementation. Furthermore, we numerically simulate these phase operators for $p=2$ and $p=3$ levels of QAOA and find that there exist a large number of subgraph, triangle-removed, and maximal degree edge-removed custom phase operators that have a higher approximation ratio than the QAOA at the same depth. These findings open up the question of whether better phase operators can be designed to further improve the performance of the QAOA.