No Arabic abstract
The problem of conditions on the initial correlations between the system and the environment that lead to completely positive (CP) or not-completely positive (NCP) maps has been studied by various authors. Two lines of study may be discerned: one concerned with families of initial correlations that induce CP dynamics under the application of an arbitrary joint unitary on the system and environment; the other concerned with specific initial states that may be highly entangled. Here we study the latter problem, and highlight the interplay between the initial correlations and the unitary applied. In particular, for almost any initial entangled state, one can furnish infinitely many joint unitaries that generate CP dynamics on the system. Restricting to the case of initial, pure entangled states, we obtain the scaling of the dimension of the set of these unitaries and show that it is of zero measure in the set of all possible interaction unitaries.
Simple examples are constructed that show the entanglement of two qubits being both increased and decreased by interactions on just one of them. One of the two qubits interacts with a third qubit, a control, that is never entangled or correlated with either of the two entangled qubits and is never entangled, but becomes correlated, with the system of those two qubits. The two entangled qubits do not interact, but their state can change from maximally entangled to separable or from separable to maximally entangled. Similar changes for the two qubits are made with a swap operation between one of the qubits and a control; then there are compensating changes of entanglement that involve the control. When the entanglement increases, the map that describes the change of the state of the two entangled qubits is not completely positive. Combination of two independent interactions that individually give exponential decay of the entanglement can cause the entanglement to not decay exponentially but, instead, go to zero at a finite time.
We investigate the evolution of open quantum systems in the presence of initial correlations with an environment. Here the standard formalism of describing evolution by completely positive trace preserving (CPTP) quantum operations can fail and non-completely positive (non-CP) maps may be observed. A new classification of correlations between a system and environment using quantum discord is explored. However, we find quantum discord is not a symmetric quantity between exchange of systems and this leads to ambiguity in classifications - states which are both quantum and classically correlated depending on the order of the two systems. State preparation in quantum process tomography is investigated with regard to non-CP maps. In SQPT the preparation procedure can influence the complete-positivity of the reconstructed quantum operation if our system is initially correlated with an environment. We examine a recently proposed preparation procedures using projective measurements, and propose our own protocol that uses a single measurement followed by unitary rotations. The former can give rise to non-CP evolution while the later will always give rise to a CP map. State preparation in AAPT was found always to give rise to CP evolution. We examine the effect of statistical noise in process tomography and find it can result in the identification of a non-CP when the evolution should be CP. The variance of the distribution for reconstructed processes is found to be inversely proportional to the number of copies of a state used to perform tomography. Finally, we detail an experiment using currently available linear optics QC devices to demonstrate non-CP maps arising in SQPT.
We introduce a framework for the construction of completely positive maps for subsystems of indistinguishable fermionic particles. In this scenario, the initial global state is always correlated, and it is not possible to tell system and environment apart. Nonetheless, a reduced map in the operator sum representation is possible for some sets of states where the only non-classical correlation present is exchange.
Two long standing open problems in quantum theory are to characterize the class of initial system-bath states for which quantum dynamics is equivalent to (1) a map between the initial and final system states, and (2) a completely positive (CP) map. The CP map problem is especially important, due to the widespread use of such maps in quantum information processing and open quantum systems theory. Here we settle both these questions by showing that the answer to the first is all, with the resulting map being Hermitian, and that the answer to the second is that CP maps arise exclusively from the class of separable states with vanishing quantum discord.
We use the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the degrees of freedom of joint system-environment initial states to investigate the reduced dynamics. We show that a subset of joint system-environment initial states guarantees completely positive reduced dynamics, if and only if the system privately owns all quantum degrees of freedom and can locally access the classical degrees of freedom, without disturbing all joint initial states in the given subset. Furthermore, we show that the quantum mutual information for such kinds of states must be independent of the quantum degrees of freedom.