Quantum States and Channels

In quantum theory, the state of a system is modeled by density operators on a Hilbert space H_A. For simplicity, we will restrict ourselves to finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In this case, density operators can be thought of as simply matrices that are Hermitian, positive semi-definite, and have trace equal to one.

The evolution of a quantum system is described by quantum channels. These are, by definition, linear maps on operators that are trace-preserving and completely positive. In particular, they are maps that take quantum states to quantum states. Let Φ be a quantum channel.

1. The trace-preserving property of Φ means that Tr[Φ(X)] = Tr(X) for all linear operators X on the Hilbert space H_A. In particular, for any density operator ρ, we get that Tr[Φ(ρ)] = 1. Physically, one can think of this property as a statement of conservation of probability.
2. The completely positive property of Φ means that 1_R ⊗ Φ is positive for any reference quantum system R of any dimension. Complete positivity is an important requirement physically since in quantum theory it is possible for particles to be entangled with an external system that is outside the control of the experimenter. Positivity of states passing through the channel should be preserved even in the presence of such entanglement.

There are many ways of representing quantum channels. One important representation of quantum channels is the Choi representation. To define it, let d_A be the dimension of the Hilbert space H_A and let us fix an orthonormal basis {|i⟩_A}_i=0^d_A−1 of H_A. Then, define the state

where H_A′ is a Hilbert space with the same dimension d as H_A. We call such a state maximally entangled. It is the higher-dimensional analogue of the two-qubit Bell state |Φ⁺⟩ = (1/√2)(|0, 0⟩ + |1, 1⟩). Using |Γ⟩_A′A, we define the Choi representation C(Φ) of the channel Φ to be

Often, one is given a map Φ and has to determine whether or not it is completely positive. Choi proved that Φ is completely positive if and only if C(Φ) is positive semi-definite. This is a remarkable result since we saw in the definition of completely positive that the reference system R can be of arbitrary dimension. What Choi’s result tells us is that to determine complete positivity it is enough to simply let R be a copy of A.

The Choi representation of a channel uniquely characterizes it since it gives us the action of Φ on the orthonormal operator basis {|i⟩⟨j|} of H_A. Indeed, we can write C(Φ) as

In particular, the action of Φ can be written explicitly in terms of its Choi representation as

Now, if Φ is trace-preserving, observe that

which means that

Therefore, the operator ρ_Φ^AB defined as

is positive semi-definite (by Choi’s theorem, since Φ is a channel) and has trace one. ρ_Φ^AB is therefore a density operator. The Choi representation thus gives us a way to associate to each quantum channel a quantum state. What about the other way around?

Suppose we are given a quantum state ρ^AB and we want to associate a quantum channel Φ_ρ to it. If we define Φ_ρ as

then Φ_ρ will certainly be completely positive (since its Choi representation is simply ρ^AB, which is positive semi-definite), but it will not be trace-preserving unless ρ^A : = Tr_B[ρ^AB] = (1/d_A)1_A. So the Choi representation only provides a one-to-one correspondence between channels and states with maximally-mixed marginal on A.

Observe that the condition Tr_B(C(Φ)) = 1_A for the trace-preservation of Φ arises from the fact that the Choi representation C(Φ) has the vector |Γ⟩ in its definition and the fact that Tr_A(|Γ⟩⟨Γ|) = 1_A′. What we would thus like is, given ρ^AB, a vector |ψ_ρ⟩_A′A that has marginal on A′ equal to ρ_A and a channel Φ_ρ such that

A slight subtlety is that the marginal on A of |ψ_ρ⟩ must have full support or else we cannot guarantee that the above expression will uniquely specify Φ_ρ on the entire operator space of H_A.

Now, observe that if we define |ψ_ρ⟩ as

then Tr_A[|ψ_ρ⟩⟨ψ_ρ|_A′A] = ρ_A. Assuming ρ_AB is such that ρ_A has full support, let’s use the above definition of |ψ_ρ⟩ and see if we can find a channel Φ_ρ such that

Expanding the left-hand side of this using the definition of |ψ_ρ⟩, we get

We require this to be equal to ρ_AB, and since ρ_A is fully supported it holds that ρ_A, and hence √ρ_A, is invertible. (Another equivalent way of stating this fact is to say that ρ_A has full rank, meaning that it has rank d_A, the dimension of H_A. Another equivalent way of stating it is that ρ_A does not have zero eigenvalues. Yet another equivalent statement is that ρ_A is positive definite.) Therefore, we can write

Now, we know how to write down the action of Φ given C(Φ). Therefore,

It is easy to check that Φ_ρ is trace-preserving using either the explicit form Φ_ρ above or its Choi representation by checking that Tr_B(C(Φ_ρ)) = 1_A. It is also clearly completely positive since its Choi representation, being the product of positive semi-definite operators, is positive semi-definite.

Now, to get this result, we assumed that our given state ρ_AB is such that ρ_A has full support, and hence is invertible. If this is not the case, then we can interpret the inverse as a generalized inverse (that is, the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse, which takes the inverse of an operator on its support). Φ_ρ will then have the action given by the expression above only on the support of ρ_A and will therefore be a channel on the support of ρ_A.

Operators of the form

are called conditional states. Specifically,

is called the state of B conditioned on A. (Note that it is not actually a state, since it does not have unit trace.) The name comes from the fact that it looks analogous to the definition

of the conditional probability distribution P(B|A), especially if we write it as

where the operation ⋆ is defined as

Note that it is common to suppress identity operators, so that the expression above should be interpreted as ρ_AB ⋆ (ρ_A⁻¹ ⊗ 1_B). With the definition of the conditional state, the action of Φ_ρ as given above is

which is reminiscent of the action of stochastic maps in classical probability theory,

The transpose is necessary in order to make Φ_ρ completely-positive; without it, the map would only be positive.

You can find more information about conditional states in the paper by Leifer and Spekkens.