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arXiv:quant-ph/0206063 · Physical Review Letters

Mixed State Geometric Phases, Entangled Systems, and Local Unitary Transformations

Marie Ericsson, Arun Kumar Pati, Erik Sjöqvist, Johan Brännlund, Daniel K. L. Oi

Published Aug 28, 2003• 69 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The geometric phase for a pure quantal state undergoing an arbitrary evolution is a "memory" of the geometry of the path in the projective Hilbert space of the system. We find that Uhlmann's geometric phase for a mixed quantal state undergoing unitary evolution depends not only on the geometry of the path of the system alone but also on a constrained bilocal unitary evolution of the purified entangled state. We analyze this in general, illustrate it for the qubit case, and propose an experiment to test this effect. We also show that the mixed state geometric phase proposed recently in the context of interferometry requires unilocal transformations and is therefore essentially a property of the system alone.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.91.090405

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The geometric phase for a pure quantal state undergoing an arbitrary evolution is a "memory" of the geometry of the path in the projective Hilbert space of the system. We find that Uhlmann's geometric phase for a mixed quantal state undergoing unitary evolution depends not only on the geometry of the path of the system alone but also on a constrained bilocal unitary evolution of the purified entangled state. We analyze this in general, illustrate it for the qubit case, and propose an experiment to test this effect. We also show that the mixed state geometric phase proposed recently in the context of interferometry requires unilocal transformations and is therefore essentially a property of the system alone.
Mixed states typically arise when quantum systems interact with the outside world. Evolution of open quantum systems in general are described by quantum operations which are represented by completely positive maps. We elucidate the notion of geometric phase for a quantum system described by a mixed state undergoing unitary evolution and non-unitary evolutions. We discuss parallel transport condition for mixed states both in the case of unitary maps and completely positive maps. We find that the relative phase shift of a system not only depends on the state of the system, but also depends on the initial state of the ancilla with which it might have interacted in the past. The geometric phase change during a sequence of quantum operations is shown to be non-additive in nature. This property can attribute a "memory" to a quantum channel. We explore these ideas and illustrate them with simple examples.
We consider arbitrary mixed state in unitary evolution and provide a comprehensive description of corresponding geometric phase in which two different points of view prevailing currently can be unified. Introducing an ancillary system and considering the purification of given mixed state, we find that different results of mixed state geometric phase correspond to different choice of the representation of Hilbert space of the ancilla. Moreover we demonstrate that in order to obtain Uhlmann's geometric phase it is not necessary to resort to the unitary evolution of ancilla.
Uhlmann's mixed state geometric phase [Rep. Math. Phys. 24,24,24, 229 (1986)] is analyzed in the case of a qubit affected by isotropic decoherence treated in the Markovian approximation. It is demonstrated that this phase decreases rapidly with increasing decoherence rate and that it is most fragile to weak decoherence for pure or nearly pure initial states. In the unitary case, we compare Uhlmann's geometric phase for mixed states with that occurring in standard Mach-Zehnder interferometry [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85,85,85, 2845 (2000)] and show that the latter is more robust to reduction in the length of the Bloch vector. We also describe how Uhlmann's geometric phase in the present case could in principle be realized experimentally.
The concept of off-diagonal geometric phases for mixed quantal states in unitary evolution is developed. We show that these phases arise from three basic ideas: (1) fulfillment of quantum parallel transport of a complete basis, (2) a concept of mixed-state orthogonality adapted to unitary evolution, and (3) a normalization condition. We provide a method for computing the off-diagonal mixed-state phases to any order for unitarities that divide the parallel transported basis of Hilbert space into two parts: one part where each basis vector undergoes cyclic evolution and one part where all basis vectors are permuted among each other. We also demonstrate a purification based experimental procedure for the two lowest-order mixed-state phases and consider a physical scenario for a full characterization of the qubit mixed-state geometric phases in terms of polarization-entangled photon pairs. An alternative second order off-diagonal mixed-state geometric phase, which can be tested in single-particle experiments, is proposed.