In this article we derive a closed form expression for the symmetric logarithmic derivative of Fermionic Gaussian states. This provides a direct way of computing the quantum Fisher Information for Fermionic Gaussian states. Applications ranges from quantum Metrology with thermal states and non-equilibrium steady states with Fermionic many-body systems.
A Gaussian degree of entanglement for a symmetric two-mode Gaussian state can be defined as its distance to the set of all separable two-mode Gaussian states. The principal property that enables us to evaluate both Bures distance and relative entropy between symmetric two-mode Gaussian states is the diagonalization of their covariance matrices under the same beam-splitter transformation. The multiplicativity property of the Uhlmann fidelity and the additivity of the relative entropy allow one to finally deal with a single-mode optimization problem in both cases. We find that only the Bures-distance Gaussian entanglement is consistent with the exact entanglement of formation.
Magic states were introduced in the context of Clifford circuits as a resource that elevates classically simulatable computations to quantum universal capability, while maintaining the same gate set. Here we study magic states in the context of matchgate (MG) circuits, where the notion becomes more subtle, as MGs are subject to locality constraints and also the SWAP gate is not available. Nevertheless a similar picture of gate-gadget constructions applies, and we show that every pure fermionic state which is non-Gaussian, i.e. which cannot be generated by MGs from a computational basis state, is a magic state for MG computations. This result has significance for prospective quantum computing implementation in view of the fact that MG circuit evolutions coincide with the quantum physical evolution of non-interacting fermions.
We study the degradability of fermionic Gaussian channels. Fermionic quantum channels are a central building block of quantum information processing with fermions, and the family of Gaussian channels, in particular, is relevant in the emerging field of electron quantum optics and its applications for quantum information. Degradable channels are of particular interest since they have a simple formula that characterizes their quantum capacity. We derive a simple standard form for fermionic Gaussian channels. This allows us to fully characterize all degradable $n$-mode fermionic Gaussian channels. In particular, we show that the only degradable such channels correspond to the attenuation or amplitude-damping channel for qubits.
We evaluate a Gaussian entanglement measure for a symmetric two-mode Gaussian state of the quantum electromagnetic field in terms of its Bures distance to the set of all separable Gaussian states. The required minimization procedure was considerably simplified by using the remarkable properties of the Uhlmann fidelity as well as the standard form II of the covariance matrix of a symmetric state. Our result for the Gaussian degree of entanglement measured by the Bures distance depends only on the smallest symplectic eigenvalue of the covariance matrix of the partially transposed density operator. It is thus consistent to the exact expression of the entanglement of formation for symmetric two-mode Gaussian states. This non-trivial agreement is specific to the Bures metric.
While general quantum many-body systems require exponential resources to be simulated on a classical computer, systems of non-interacting fermions can be simulated exactly using polynomially scaling resources. Such systems may be of interest in their own right, but also occur as effective models in numerical methods for interacting systems, such as Hartree-Fock, density functional theory, and many others. Often it is desirable to solve systems of many thousand constituent particles, rendering these simulations computationally costly despite their polynomial scaling. We demonstrate how this scaling can be improved by adapting methods based on matrix product states, which have been enormously successful for low-dimensional interacting quantum systems, to the case of free fermions. Compared to the case of interacting systems, our methods achieve an exponential speedup in the entanglement entropy of the state. We demonstrate their use to solve systems of up to one million sites with an effective MPS bond dimension of 10^15.