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arXiv:quant-ph/0210197 · Physical Review A

Quantum limits to dynamical evolution

Vittorio Giovannetti, Seth Lloyd, Lorenzo Maccone

Published May 30, 2003• 385 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We establish the minimum time it takes for an initial state of mean energy E and energy spread $\ensuremath{\Delta}E$ to move from its initial configuration by a predetermined amount. Distances in Hilbert space are estimated by the fidelity between the initial and final states. In this context, we study the role of entanglement among subsystems in speeding up the dynamics of a composite system.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.67.052109

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We establish the minimum time it takes for an initial state of mean energy E and energy spread \ensuremathΔE\ensuremath{\Delta}E\ensuremathΔE to move from its initial configuration by a predetermined amount. Distances in Hilbert space are estimated by the fidelity between the initial and final states. In this context, we study the role of entanglement among subsystems in speeding up the dynamics of a composite system.
Entanglement is closely related to some fundamental features of the dynamics of composite quantum systems: quantum entanglement enhances the "speed" of evolution of certain quantum states, as measured by the time required to reach an orthogonal state. The concept of "speed" of quantum evolution constitutes an important ingredient in any attempt to determine the fundamental limits that basic physical laws impose on how fast a physical system can process or transmit information. Here we explore the relationship between entanglement and the speed of quantum evolution in the context of the quantum brachistochrone problem. Given an initial and a final state of a composite system we consider the amount of entanglement associated with the brachistochrone evolution between those states, showing that entanglement is an essential resource to achieve the alluded time-optimal quantum evolution.
The average energy and energy spread of a quantum system are two important factors that affect a system's evolution speed, which is usually defined as the changing rate of the distance between a quantum state and the state during its evolution. Alternatively, the evolution speed of a quantum system could also be studied based on its evolution path. It is found that if we define the evolution speed of a quantum unitary system as the changing rate of the path distance between a quantum state and the state during its evolution, the instantaneous evolution speed is determined by the Hamiltonian's eigenvalues, rather than its expectation value or variance imposed on any quantum state. More specifically, the range of the Hamiltonian's eigenvalues determines the evolution speed of a quantum system through the relation ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{H}=\frac{1}{2}({\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{max}\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{min})$, which is independent of the quantum state. Given an initial state ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{0}$ in a quantum unitary system, the minimum time required to evolve it to a target state ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$ is ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{min}=\frac{{\mathcal{L}}_{min}({\ensuremath{\rho}}_{0},{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}})}{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{H}}$, where ${\mathcal{L}}_{min}({\ensuremath{\rho}}_{0},{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}})$ is the path distance contained in the shortest evolution from ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{0}$ to ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{\ensuremath{\tau}}$. This lower bound of the evolution time is tight and achievable in a finite-energy system.
The time needed by a quantum system to reach a state fully distinguishable from the original one provides a natural way of determining how fast the corresponding dynamical evolution is. This orthogonality time admits a lower bound, expressible in terms of the energy's expectation value and the energy's standard deviation, that yields a 'quantum speed limit'. Composite quantum systems need entanglement in order to achieve this limit. So far, most studies on the connection between entanglement and the quantum speed limit have focused on the case of non-interacting systems. The connection between quantum speed and entanglement is systematically investigated here for the case of a system of two interacting qubits, taking into consideration all possible initial states that evolve into an orthogonal one.
There is a lower bound for the 'speed' of quantum evolution as measured by the time needed to reach an orthogonal state. We show that, for two-qubits systems, states saturating the quantum speed limit tend to exhibit a small amount of local evolution, as measured by the fidelity between the initial and final single qubit states after the time τ required by the composite system to reach an orthogonal state. Consequently, a trade-off between the speed of global evolution and the amount of local evolution seems to be at work.
For any pair of quantum states, an initial state |I and a final quantum state |F , in a Hilbert space, there are many Hamiltonians H under which |I evolves into |F .Let us impose the constraint that the difference between the largest and smallest eigenvalues of H, E max and E min , is held fixed.We can then determine the Hamiltonian H that satisfies this constraint and achieves the transformation from the initial state to the final state in the least possible time τ .For Hermitian Hamiltonians, τ has a nonzero lower bound.However, among non-Hermitian PT -symmetric Hamiltonians satisfying the same energy constraint, τ can be made arbitrarily small without violating the time-energy uncertainty principle.The minimum value of τ can be made arbitrarily small because for PT -symmetric Hamiltonians the path from the vector |I to the vector |F , as measured using the Hilbert-space metric appropriate for this theory, can be made arbitrarily short.The mechanism described here is similar to that in general relativity in which the distance between two space-time points can be made small if they are connected by a wormhole.This result may have applications in quantum computing.
It has been recently pointed out [V. Giovannetti, S. Lloyd, and L. Maccone, Europhys. Lett. 62, 615 (2003)] that, for certain classes of states, quantum entanglement enhances the ``speed'' of evolution of composite quantum systems, as measured by the time a given initial state requires to evolve to an orthogonal state. We provide here a systematic study of this effect for pure states of bipartite systems of low dimensionality, considering both distinguishable (two-qubits) subsystems, and systems constituted of two indistinguishable particles.