English

Concentration of measure for quantum states with a fixed expectation value

Quantum Physics 2011-05-03 v2 Statistical Mechanics Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Given some observable H of a finite-dimensional quantum system, we investigate the typical properties of random quantum state vectors that have a fixed expectation value with respect to H. Under some some conditions on the spectrum, we prove that this manifold of quantum states shows a concentration of measure phenomenon: any continuous function on this set is almost everywhere close to its mean. We also give a method to estimate the corresponding expectation values analytically, and we prove a formula for the typical reduced density matrix in the case that H is a sum of local observables. We discuss the implications of our results as new proof tools in quantum information theory and to study phenomena in quantum statistical mechanics. As a by-product, we derive a method to sample the resulting distribution numerically, which generalizes the well-known Gaussian method to draw random states from the sphere.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1003.4982,
  title  = {Concentration of measure for quantum states with a fixed expectation value},
  author = {Markus Mueller and David Gross and Jens Eisert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.4982},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

21 pages, 1 figure; v2: typos corrected, Lemmas 18 and 20 improved, added error discussion to algorithm