We introduce the notion of the BKM coercivity constant and show that the positivity of this constant governs the exponential relative entropy decay of the semigroup. Indeed, we prove that the modified log-Sobolev constant is equivalent to the BKM coercivity constant up to a constant depending on the asymptotic conditional expectation. We also discover that the BKM coercivity constants for matrix amplifications are already attained with a qubit auxiliary system, which also coincides with the GNS spectral gap of the generating Lindbladian. As a corollary, we establish a criterion that the complete modified log-Sobolev inequality holds if and only if the GNS gap of the semigroup is strictly positive. All the discussion above applies to quantum Markov semigroups that admit a faithful asymptotic conditional expectation as long-time equilibration, with no detailed balance condition assumed. As an application, we show the finite-dimensional Chen-Kastoryano-Gilyén Gibbs samplers always satisfy the complete modified log-Sobolev inequality.
We generalize the notions of the non-commutative Poincaré and modified log-Sobolev inequalities for primitive quantum Markov semigroups (QMS) to not necessarily primitive ones. These two inequalities provide estimates on the decoherence time of the evolution. More precisely, we focus on an algebraic definition of environment-induced decoherence in open quantum systems which happens to be generic on finite dimensional systems and describes the asymptotic behavior of any QMS. An essential tool in our analysis is the explicit structure of the decoherence-free algebra generated by the QMS, a central object in the study of passive quantum error correction schemes. The Poincaré constant corresponds to the spectral gap of the QMS, which implies its positivity, while we prove that the modified log-Sobolev constant is positive under the
L1-regularity of the Dirichlet form, a condition that also appears in the primitive case. We furthermore prove that strong
Lp-regularity holds for QMS that satisfy a strong form of detailed balance condition for
p≥1. The latter condition includes all known cases where this strong regularity was proved. Finally and to emphasize the mathematical interest of this study compared to the classical case, we focus on two truly quantum scenarios, one exhibiting quantum coherence, and the other, quantum correlations.