Reviews in Mathematical Physics

This is a review of the geometry of quantum states using elementary methods and pictures. Quantum states are represented by a convex body, often in high dimensions. In the case of $n$ qubits, the dimension is exponentially large in $n$. The space of states can be visualized, to some extent, by its simple cross sections: Regular simplexes, balls and hyper-octahedra. When the dimension gets large, there is a precise sense in which the space of states resembles, almost in every direction, a ball. The ball turns out to be a ball of rather low purity states. We also address some of the corresponding, but harder, geometric properties of separable and entangled states and entanglement witnesses.

“All convex bodies behave a bit like Euclidean balls.”

Keith Ball

In this work, we will show how the topological order of the Toric Code appears when the lattice on which it is defined discretizes a three-dimensional torus. In order to do this, we will present a pedagogical review of the traditional two-dimensional Toric Code, with an emphasis on how its quasiparticles are conceived and transported. With that, we want to make clear not only how all these same quasiparticle conception and transportation fit into this three-dimensional model, but to make it clear how topology controls the degeneracy of ground state in this new situation.

Interior-boundary conditions (IBCs) have been suggested as a possibility to circumvent the problem of ultraviolet divergences in quantum field theories. In the IBC approach, particle creation and annihilation is described with the help of linear conditions that relate the wave functions of two sectors of Fock space: ${\psi }^{(n)}(p)$ at an interior point $p$ and ${\psi }^{(n+m)}(q)$ at a boundary point $q$, typically a collision configuration. Here, we extend IBCs to the relativistic case. To do this, we make use of Dirac’s concept of multi-time wave functions, i.e. wave functions $\psi (x_1,\dots ,x_N)$ depending on $N$ space-time coordinates $x_i$ for $N$ particles. This provides the manifestly covariant particle-position representation that is required in the IBC approach. In order to obtain rigorous results, we construct a model for Dirac particles in 1+1 dimensions that can create or annihilate each other when they meet. Our main results are an existence and uniqueness theorem for that model, and the identification of a class of IBCs ensuring local probability conservation on all Cauchy surfaces. Furthermore, we explain how these IBCs relate to the usual formulation with creation and annihilation operators. The Lorentz invariance is discussed and it is found that, apart from a constant matrix (which is required to transform in a certain way), the model is manifestly Lorentz invariant. This makes it clear that the IBC approach can be made compatible with relativity.

In this work, we provide a strengthening of the data processing inequality for the relative entropy introduced by Belavkin and Staszewski (BS-entropy). This extends previous results by Carlen and Vershynina for the relative entropy and other standard $f$-divergences. To this end, we provide two new equivalent conditions for the equality case of the data processing inequality for the BS-entropy. Subsequently, we extend our result to a larger class of maximal $f$-divergences. Here, we first focus on quantum channels which are conditional expectations onto subalgebras and use the Stinespring dilation to lift our results to arbitrary quantum channels.