Related papers: Indistinguishability and improper mixtures
The problem of discriminating with minimum error between two mixed quantum states is reviewed, with emphasize on the detection operators necessary for performing the measurement. An analytical result is derived for the minimum probability…
In the context of a physical theory, two devices, A and B, described by the theory are called incompatible if the theory does not allow the existence of a third device C that would have both A and B as its components. Incompatibility is a…
A bipartite state which is secretly chosen from a finite set of known entangled pure states cannot be immediately useful in standard quantum information processing tasks. To effectively make use of the entanglement contained in this unknown…
Quantum information is nonlocal in the sense that local measurements on a composite quantum system, prepared in one of many mutually orthogonal states, may not reveal in which state the system was prepared. It is shown that in the many copy…
A complete apparatus is defined as reacting to every state of the measured system. Standard quantum mechanics of indistinguishable particles is shown to imply that apparatuses must be incomplete or else they would be drowned out by noise.…
In this article, we study the problem of comparing mixed quantum states: given $n$ unknown mixed quantum states, can one determine whether they are identical or not with an unambiguous quantum measurement? We first study universal…
We consider N quantum systems initially prepared in pure states and address the problem of unambiguously comparing them. One may ask whether or not all $N$ systems are in the same state. Alternatively, one may ask whether or not the states…
A measurement has been proposed by B. d'Espagnat that would distinguish from one another some ensembles that are differently prepared but correspond to the same density matrix. Here, the idea is modified so that it becomes applicable to…
Pure state of a physical system can be prepared in an infinite number of ways. Here, we prove that given a pure state of a quantum system it is impossible to distinguish two preparation procedures. Further, we show that if we can…
Quantum coherence is a key element in topical research on quantum resource theories and a primary facilitator for design and implementation of quantum technologies. However, the resourcefulness of quantum coherence is severely restricted by…
The Everett-interpretation description of isolated measurements, i.e., measurements involving interaction between a measuring apparatus and a measured system but not interaction with the environment, is shown to be unambiguous, claims in…
Information-theoretic aspects of quantum inseparability of mixed states are investigated in terms of the $\alpha$-entropy inequalities and teleportation fidelity. Inseparability of mixed states is defined and a complete characterization of…
It is known that probabilistically mixing an arbitrary pair of pure quantum states, one of which is entangled and the other product, in any bipartite quantum system, one always obtains an entangled state, provided the entangled state of the…
We consider two different optimized measurement strategies for the discrimination of nonorthogonal quantum states. The first is conclusive discrimination with a minimum probability of inferring an erroneous result, and the second is…
General wisdom tells us that if two quantum states are ``macroscopically distinguishable'' then their superposition should be hard to observe. We make this intuition precise and general by quantifying the difficulty to observe the quantum…
Protective measurement, which was proposed as a method of observing the wavefunction of a single system, is extended to the observation of the density matrix of a single system. d'Espagnat's definition of `proper mixture' is shown to be…
This paper discusses experiments with single-particle systems, some of whose states appear to be entangled. It shows that the interpretation of the experiments in terms of entanglement is ill-defined. Three forms of ambiguity are discussed.…
In this paper, we consider the problem of unambiguous discrimination between a set of mixed quantum states. We first divide the density matrix of each mixed state into two parts by the fact that it comes from ensemble of pure quantum…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the…
We describe a purely algebraic method for finding the best separable approximation to a mixed state of a composite 2x2 quantum system, consisting of a decomposition of the state into a linear combination of a mixed separable part and a pure…