No Arabic abstract
The important problem of how to prepare a quantum mechanical system, $S$, in a specific initial state of interest - e.g., for the purposes of some experiment - is addressed. Three distinct methods of state preparation are described. One of these methods has the attractive feature that it enables one to prepare $S$ in a preassigned initial state with certainty; i.e., the probability of success in preparing $S$ in a given state is unity. This method relies on coupling $S$ to an open quantum-mechanical environment, $E$, in such a way that the dynamics of $S vee E$ pulls the state of $S$ towards an attractor, which is the desired initial state of $S$. This method is analyzed in detail.
This paper presents the momentum map structures which emerge in the dynamics of mixed states. Both quantum and classical mechanics are shown to possess analogous momentum map pairs. In the quantum setting, the right leg of the pair identifies the Berry curvature, while its left leg is shown to lead to more general realizations of the density operator which have recently appeared in quantum molecular dynamics. Finally, the paper shows how alternative representations of both the density matrix and the classical density are equivariant momentum maps generating new Clebsch representations for both quantum and classical dynamics. Uhlmanns density matrix and Koopman-von Neumann wavefunctions are shown to be special cases of this construction.
The problem of reconstructing information on a physical system from data acquired in long sequences of direct (projective) measurements of some simple physical quantities - histories - is analyzed within quantum mechanics; that is, the quantum theory of indirect measurements, and, in particular, of non-demolition measurements is studied. It is shown that indirect measurements of time-independent features of physical systems can be described in terms of quantum-mechanical operators belonging to an algebra of asymptotic observables. Our proof involves associating a natural measure space with certain sets of histories of a system and showing that quantum-mechanical states of the system determine probability measures on this space. Our main result then says that functions on that space of histories measurable at infinity (i.e., functions that only depend on the tails of histories) correspond to operators in the algebra of asymptotic observables.
The existing relation between the tomographic description of quantum states and the convolution algebra of certain discrete groupoids represented on Hilbert spaces will be discussed. The realizations of groupoid algebras based on qudit, photon-number (Fock) states and symplectic tomography quantizers and dequantizers will be constructed. Conditions for identifying the convolution product of groupoid functions and the star--product arising from a quantization--dequantization scheme will be given. A tomographic approach to construct quasi--distributions out of suitable immersions of groupoids into Hilbert spaces will be formulated and, finally, intertwining kernels for such generalized symplectic tomograms will be evaluated explicitly.
We consider the geometrization of quantum mechanics. We then focus on the pull-back of the Fubini-Study metric tensor field from the projective Hibert space to the orbits of the local unitary groups. An inner product on these tensor fields allows us to obtain functions which are invariant under the considered local unitary groups. This procedure paves the way to an algorithmic approach to the identification of entanglement monotone candidates. Finally, a link between the Fubini-Study metric and a quantum version of the Fisher information metric is discussed.
The Landauer principle asserts that the energy cost of erasure of one bit of information by the action of a thermal reservoir in equilibrium at temperature T is never less than $kTlog 2$. We discuss Landauers principle for quantum statistical models describing a finite level quantum system S coupled to an infinitely extended thermal reservoir R. Using Arakis perturbation theory of KMS states and the Avron-Elgart adiabatic theorem we prove, under a natural ergodicity assumption on the joint system S+R, that Landauers bound saturates for adiabatically switched interactions. The recent work of Reeb and Wolf on the subject is discussed and compared.