When an electromagnetic signal propagates in vacuo, a polarization detector cannot be rigorously perpendicular to the wave-vector because of diffraction effects. The vacuum behaves as a noisy channel, even if the detectors are perfect. The ‘noise’ can, however, be reduced and nearly cancelled by a relative motion of the observer towards the source. The standard definition of a reduced density matrix fails for photon polarization, because the transversality condition behaves like a superselection rule. We can, however, define an effective reduced density matrix which corresponds to a restricted class of positive operator-valued measures. There are no pure photon qubits and no exactly orthogonal qubit states.
This article discusses the intimate relationship between quantum mechanics, information theory, and relativity theory. Taken together these are the foundations of present-day theoretical physics, and their interrelationship is an essential part of the theory. The acquisition of information from a quantum system by an observer occurs at the interface of classical and quantum physics. The authors review the essential tools needed to describe this interface, i.e., Kraus matrices and positive-operator-valued measures. They then discuss how special relativity imposes severe restrictions on the transfer of information between distant systems and the implications of the fact that quantum entropy is not a Lorentz-covariant concept. This leads to a discussion of how it comes about that Lorentz transformations of reduced density matrices for entangled systems may not be completely positive maps. Quantum field theory is, of course, necessary for a consistent description of interactions. Its structure implies a fundamental tradeoff between detector reliability and localizability. Moreover, general relativity produces new and counterintuitive effects, particularly when black holes (or, more generally, event horizons) are involved. In this more general context the authors discuss how most of the current concepts in quantum information theory may require a reassessment.
A foundational result in relativistic quantum information theory due to Peres, Scudo, and Terno, is that von Neumann entropy is not Lorentz invariant. Motivated by the "It from Qubit" paradigm, here we show that Lorentzian symmetries of quantum information emerge naturally in a pre-spacetime setting, without any reference to external variables such as position or momentum. In particular, we derive the natural action of the restricted Lorentz group
SO+(1,3) on the internal degrees of freedom of a single qubit from a simple, information-theoretic principle we refer to as preservation of linear entropy. It is then shown that the Lorentz invariance of the linear entropy of a relativistic qubit is a special case of a much more general phenomenon, namely, that any spectral invariant of an operator we term the '
W-matrix' is an
SL(2,C)⊗n invariant scalar. Consequently, the linear
n-partite quantum mutual information is shown to be an
SL(2,C)⊗n invariant for all
n-qubit states. Finally, we show that the correlation function associated with a pair of qubits in the singlet state yields the Minkowski metric on the space of qubit observables, whose symmetry group is the full Lorentz group
SO(1,3). In accordance with the "It from Qubit" paradigm, our results thus establish the natural emergence of relativistic spacetime structure from intrinsic properties of quantum information.
We show that any quantum information theory based on anticommuting operators must be supplemented by a superselection rule deeply rooted in relativity to establish a reasonable notion of entanglement. While quantum information may be encoded in the fermionic Fock space, the unrestricted theory has a peculiar feature: the marginals of bipartite pure states need not have identical entropies, which leads to an ambiguous definition of entanglement. We solve this problem, by proving that it is removed by relativity, i.e., by the parity superselection rule that arises from Lorentz invariance via the spin-statistics connection. Our results hence unveil a fundamental conceptual inseparability of quantum information and the causal structure of relativistic field theory.
We have shown that the covariant relativistic spin operator is equivalent to the spin operator commuting with the free Dirac Hamiltonian. This implies that the covariant relativistic spin operator is a good quantum observable. The covariant relativistic spin operator has a pure quantum contribution that does not exist in the classical covariant spin operator. Based on this equivalence, reduced spin states can be clearly defined. We have shown that depending on the relative motion of an observer, the change in the entropy of a reduced spin density matrix sweeps through the whole range.