English

Coherence and imaginarity of quantum states

Quantum Physics 2025-01-14 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Baumgratz, Cramer and Plenio established a rigorous framework (BCP framework) for quantifying the coherence of quantum states [\href{http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.140401}{Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)}]. In BCP framework, a quantum state is called incoherent if it is diagonal in the fixed orthonormal basis, and a coherence measure should satisfy some conditions. For a fixed orthonormal basis, if a quantum state ρ\rho has nonzero imaginary part, then ρ\rho must be coherent. How to quantitatively characterize this fact? In this work, we show that any coherence measure CC in BCP framework has the property C(ρ)C(C(\rho )-C(Reρ)0\rho )\geq 0 if CC is invariant under state complex conjugation, i.e., C(ρ)=C(ρ)C(\rho )=C(\rho ^{\ast }), here ρ\rho ^{\ast } is the conjugate of ρ,\rho , Reρ\rho is the real part of ρ.\rho . If CC does not satisfy C(ρ)=C(ρ),C(\rho )=C(\rho ^{\ast }), we can define a new coherence measure C(ρ)=12[C(ρ)+C(ρ)]C^{\prime }(\rho )=\frac{1}{2}[C(\rho )+C(\rho ^{\ast })] such that C(ρ)=C(ρ).C^{\prime }(\rho )=C^{\prime }(\rho ^{\ast }). We also establish some similar results for bosonic Gaussian states.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.06210,
  title  = {Coherence and imaginarity of quantum states},
  author = {Jianwei Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.06210},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

9 pages, 3 figures. Comments welcome!