No Arabic abstract
A recent work (2014 New J. Phys. 16 013006) claims that nonmonotonic structures found in the many-particle quantum-to-classical transition (2013 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110 1227-1231; 2011 Phys. Rev. A 83 062111) are not exclusive to the many-body domain, but they also appear for single-photon as well as for semi-classical systems. We show that these situations, however, do not incorporate any quantum-to-classical transition, which makes the claims unsustainable.
We develop a resource theory of symmetric distinguishability, the fundamental objects of which are elementary quantum information sources, i.e., sources that emit one of two possible quantum states with given prior probabilities. Such a source can be represented by a classical-quantum state of a composite system $XA$, corresponding to an ensemble of two quantum states, with $X$ being classical and $A$ being quantum. We study the resource theory for two different classes of free operations: $(i)$ ${rm{CPTP}}_A$, which consists of quantum channels acting only on $A$, and $(ii)$ conditional doubly stochastic (CDS) maps acting on $XA$. We introduce the notion of symmetric distinguishability of an elementary source and prove that it is a monotone under both these classes of free operations. We study the tasks of distillation and dilution of symmetric distinguishability, both in the one-shot and asymptotic regimes. We prove that in the asymptotic regime, the optimal rate of converting one elementary source to another is equal to the ratio of their quantum Chernoff divergences, under both these classes of free operations. This imparts a new operational interpretation to the quantum Chernoff divergence. We also obtain interesting operational interpretations of the Thompson metric, in the context of the dilution of symmetric distinguishability.
Quantum coherence is a useful resource that is consumed to accomplish several tasks that classical devices are hard to fulfill. Especially, it is considered to be the origin of quantum speedup for many computational algorithms. In this work, we interpret the computational time cost of boson sampling with partially distinguishable photons from the perspective of coherence resource theory. With incoherent operations that preserve the diagonal elements of quantum states up to permutation, which we name emph{permuted genuinely incoherent operation} (pGIO), we present some evidence that the decrease of coherence corresponds to a computationally less complex system of partially distinguishable boson sampling. Our result shows that coherence is one of crucial resources for the computational time cost of boson sampling. We expect our work presents an insight to understand the quantum complexity of the linear optical network system.
Random walks serve as important tools for studying complex network structures, yet their dynamics in cases where transition probabilities are not static remain under explored and poorly understood. Here we study nonlinear random walks that occur when transition probabilities depend on the state of the system. We show that when these transition probabilities are non-monotonic, i.e., are not uniformly biased towards the most densely or sparsely populated nodes, but rather direct random walkers with more nuance, chaotic dynamics emerge. Using multiple transition probability functions and a range of networks with vastly different connectivity properties, we demonstrate that this phenomenon is generic. Thus, when such non-monotonic properties are key ingredients in nonlinear transport applications complicated and unpredictable behaviors may result.
We put forward an operational degree of polarization that can be extended in a natural way to fields whose wave fronts are not necessarily planar. This measure appears as a distance from a state to the set of all its polarization-transformed counterparts. By using the Hilbert-Schmidt metric, the resulting degree is a sum of two terms: one is the purity of the state and the other can be interpreted as a classical distinguishability, which can be experimentally determined in an interferometric setup. For transverse fields, this reduces to the standard approach, whereas it allows one to get a straight expression for nonparaxial fields.
The orthocomplemented modular lattice of subspaces L[H(d)], of a quantum system with d- dimensional Hilbert space H(d), is considered. A generalized additivity relation which holds for Kolmogorov probabilities, is violated by quantum probabilities in the full lattice L[H(d)] (it is only valid within the Boolean subalgebras of L[H(d)]). This suggests the use of more general (than Kolmogorov) probability theories, and here the Dempster-Shafer probability theory is adopted. An operator D(H1,H2), which quantifies deviations from Kolmogorov probability theory is introduced, and it is shown to be intimately related to the commutator of the projectors P(H1),P(H2), to the subspaces H1,H2. As an application, it is shown that the proof of CHSH inequalities for a system of two spin 1/2 particles, is valid for Kolmogorov probabilities, but it is not valid for Dempster- Shafer probabilities. The violation of these inequalities in experiments, supports the interpretation of quantum probabilities as Dempster-Shafer probabilities.