Quantifying the quantumness of pure-state ensembles via coherence of Gram matrix

Wendao Yuan, Zhaoqi Wu, Shao-Ming Fei

Yuan Sun, Shunlong Luo, Xiangyun Lei

The Gram matrix of a set of vectors, which encapsulates the relations between the constituent vectors, plays an important role in the exploration of both geometric and information-theoretic aspects of quantum state space. In view of its usefulness and importance, we study the Gram matrix of an ensemble of pure states (a set of pure states with a prior probability distribution) and reveal its fundamental properties. We highlight and exploit the fact that the Gram matrix of an ensemble can be formally regarded as a bona fide quantum state. The key idea is to employ coherence (with respect to the computational basis) of the Gram matrix (regarded as a quantum state) to quantify quantumness of the corresponding ensemble. In particular, we propose to use the l 1 -norm of coherence and the relative entropy of coherence, of the Gram matrix, as two significant quantifiers of quantumness. We illustrate the effectiveness and power of these quantifiers of quantumness by evaluating them for several important ensembles arising from quantum measurement and quantum cryptography. We further compare the quantumness based on the Gram matrix with various other quantifiers of quantumness in the literature, and show that although they are closely related in general, they have subtle differences and capture different aspects of ensembles, which shed light on the complexity of quantum ensembles.

R. Muthuganesan, V. K. Chandrasekar

Wendao Yuan, Zhaoqi Wu, Shao-Ming Fei

Abstract The Gram matrix of an ensemble of pure states can be regarded as a quantum state, and the quantumness of the ensemble can be quantified by the coherence of the Gram matrix. By using the affinity between mixed states, the concept of Gram matrix of pure-state ensembles can be extended to the one of mixed-state ensembles. By utilizing the generalized α - z -relative Rényi entropy of coherence of Gram matrices, we present a new quantifier of quantumness of mixed-sate ensembles and further reveal its peculiar properties. To illustrate our quantumness of mixed-sate ensembles, we also calculate the quantumness for some detailed mixed-sate ensembles by deriving their analytical formulae.

Yuanyuan Mao, Hongting Song

Yuan Sun, Shunlong Luo

Abstract A quantum measurement (e.g., positive-operator valued measure, or more generally, instrument) performed on a system state yields a post-measurement ensemble (a family of outcome states together with the corresponding outcome probabilities), which may have quantumness due to the impossibility to perfectly discriminate the constituent states. In order to characterize information contents and structure of a measurement, it is desirable to investigate the post-measurement ensemble. In this work, we study post-measurement quantumness (i.e., quantumness of the post-measurement ensemble) by introducing a Gram matrix summarizing the interaction between a measurement and a state, and explore its implications and consequences. Gram matrix of an ensemble can be regarded as a quantum state (density operator) in an auxiliary system with a computational basis labelling the measurement outcomes. Our basic idea is to exploit coherence of the Gram matrix (with respect to the computational basis of the auxiliary system) and employ it to quantify post-measurement quantumness . We propose several quantifiers of quantumness and reveal their basic properties. We further evaluate explicitly quantumness of measurements arising from several important quantum channels, and illustrate a comparison between them. This provides a method for investigating measurements from the perspective of coherence of Gram matrix.