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arXiv:quant-ph/0103149 · Physical Review Letters

Transmission of a Cartesian Frame by a Quantum System

Asher Peres, Petra F. Scudo

Published Sep 26, 2001• 76 citations
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Abstract

A single quantum system, such as a hydrogen atom, can transmit a Cartesian coordinate frame (three axes). For this it has to be prepared in a superposition of states belonging to different irreducible representations of the rotation group. The algorithm for decoding such a state is presented, and the fidelity of transmission is evaluated.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.87.167901

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A single quantum system, such as a hydrogen atom, can transmit a Cartesian coordinate frame (three axes). For this it has to be prepared in a superposition of states belonging to different irreducible representations of the rotation group. The algorithm for decoding such a state is presented, and the fidelity of transmission is evaluated.
Typical quantum communication schemes are such that to achieve perfect decoding the receiver must share a reference frame (RF) with the sender. Indeed, if the receiver only possesses a bounded-size quantum token of the sender's RF, then the decoding is imperfect, and we can describe this effect as a noisy quantum channel. We seek here to characterize the performance of such schemes, or equivalently, to determine the effective decoherence induced by having a bounded-size RF. We assume that the token is prepared in a special state that has particularly nice group-theoretic properties and that is near-optimal for transmitting information about the sender's frame. We present a decoding operation, which can be proven to be near-optimal in this case, and we demonstrate that there are two distinct ways of implementing it (corresponding to two distinct Kraus decompositions). In one, the receiver measures the orientation of the RF token and reorients the system appropriately. In the other, the receiver extracts the encoded information from the virtual subsystems that describe the relational degrees of freedom of the system and token. Finally, we provide explicit characterizations of these decoding schemes when the system is a single qubit and for three standard kinds of RF: a phase reference, a Cartesian frame (representing an orthogonal triad of spatial directions), and a reference direction (representing a single spatial direction).
In physical experiments, reference frames are standardly modeled through a specific choice of coordinates used to describe the physical systems, but they themselves are not considered as such. However, any reference frame is a physical system that ultimately behaves according to quantum mechanics. We develop a framework for rotational (i.e., spin) quantum reference frames, with respect to which quantum systems with spin degrees of freedom are described. We give an explicit model for such frames as systems composed of three spin coherent states of angular momentum jjj and introduce the transformations between them by upgrading the Euler angles occurring in classical SO(3)\text{SO}(3)SO(3) spin transformations to quantum mechanical operators acting on the states of the reference frames. To ensure that an arbitrary rotation can be applied on the spin we take the limit of infinitely large jjj, in which case the angle operator possesses a continuous spectrum. We prove that rotationally invariant Hamiltonians (such as that of the Heisenberg model) are invariant under a larger group of quantum reference frame transformations. Our result is a development of the quantum reference frame formalism for a non-Abelian group.
The orientation in space of a Cartesian coordinate system can be indicated by the two vectorial constants of motion of a classical Keplerian orbit: the angular momentum and the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector. In quantum mechanics, the states of a hydrogen atom that mimic classical elliptic orbits are the coherent states of the SO(4) rotation group. It is known how to produce these states experimentally. They have minimal dispersions of the two conserved vectors and can be used as direction indicators. We compare the fidelity of this transmission method with that of the idealized optimal method.
There are unfortunately a large variety of possibilities for writing down a rotation; also there are two different interpretations of the word ‘rotation’. Obviously, if one rotates first the coordinate frame and then, by the same rotation, the space, all points will obtain again the same coordinate as before these rotations; the same is true in the reverse order. Rotational invariance means then that the result of this rotation, seen by an observer who did not participate in the rotation, is again a possible state of the unrotated system. One says the rotations in the physical three-dimensional space induce unitary transformations in the Hilbert space, whose matrices give rise to (infinitely many independent) representations of the rotation group. The active interpretation means carrying out the sequence of rotations using a fixed system of rotation axes; the passive interpretation means carrying out the rotations using a system of rotation axes which participates in the rotation.