Chapter 5 - Quantum Information: Basic Principles and Simple Examples

Introduction

Quantum computers may be a few years away. However, some quantum information processing tasks which can be performed now are quite interesting and informative. In this chapter we examine a few of these. In addition, we add related material which provides constaints on our ability to manipulate quantum information. Until fairly recently these constraints have been considered a problem, or just the way things are, and were not considered further. Now these attitudes have changed and these constraints have been found useful. These two cosntraints, the uncertainty principle and the no-cloning theorem, are presented here because they are very important to the effectiveness of the BB84 protocol as well as other quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols.

No Cloning!

Quantum mechanics is quite different from classical mechanics and some of these differences are more striking that others. One very striking example of their differences is the so-called ''No Cloning Theorem'' primarily attributed to Wootters and Zurek \cite{Nocloning}. (See also \cite{NocloningPTrev} and References therein.)

The general statement of the theorem is as follows. No Cloning Theorem: No quantum operation exists which can duplicate perfectly an arbitrary quantum state.

Put another way, there is no universal quantum copying machine which will take in a state and put out two copies of the same state for any input state. There is a very simple way in which to see this is true even if there are deeper reasons behind it. Following Neilsen and Chuang, let us consider an easy way to see this and postpone a more thorough discussion. The difference between quantum information and classical information is striking in this theorem since one may take any piece of paper and put it on a copier and get two which are nearly identical. Alternatively, you could take a picture.

Suppose there was a quantum copying machine. This machine would take some state Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \left\vert\psi_1\right\rangle\,\!} an arbitrary input state, (also possibly some ancillary quantum system Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \left\vert\phi_0\right\rangle\,\!} ) and produce two copies of that state. Here is how we would write this, using $U\,\!$ as our unitary (this is how states transform) which performs the copying:

	$U\left\vert \psi _{1}\right\rangle \otimes \left\vert \phi _{0}\right\rangle =\left\vert \psi _{1}\right\rangle \otimes \left\vert \psi \right\rangle .\,\!$	(5.1)

This, of course, must be true for any $\left\vert \psi \right\rangle \,\!$. So it must also be true for $\left\vert \psi _{2}\right\rangle \,\!$, meaning

	$U\left\vert \psi _{2}\right\rangle \otimes \left\vert \phi _{0}\right\rangle =\left\vert \psi _{2}\right\rangle \otimes \left\vert \psi \right\rangle .\,\!$	(5.2)

Now, we can multiply the right-hand side of Eq.~(\ref{eq:clone1}) with the Hermitian conjugate of the right-hand side of Eq.~(\ref{eq:clone2}) and similarly the left-hand sides of these two equations. This gives

	$(\left\langle \psi _{2}\right\vert \otimes \left\langle \phi _{0}\right\vert U^{\dagger })(U\left\vert \psi _{1}\right\rangle \otimes \left\vert \phi _{0}\right\rangle )=(\left\langle \psi _{2}\right\vert \otimes \left\langle \psi _{2}\right\vert )(\left\vert \psi _{1}\right\rangle \otimes \left\vert \phi _{1}\right\rangle ).\,\!$	(5.3)

This gives

$\left\langle \psi _{2}\mid \psi _{1}\right\rangle =(\left\langle \psi _{2}\mid \psi _{1}\right\rangle )^{2}.\,\!$

The only way a number to be equal to its square is if it is zero or one. This means that the two states are the same, or they are orthogonal. This certainly excludes arbitrary states, but we wanted a copier which would work with any states. Therefore, it is just not possible to have a cloning, or copying, machine for quantum states.

Uncertainty Principle

The uncertainty principle is something which is considered very important to all of quantum theory. There is no close classical analog. It is introduced here for lack of a better place to put it. However, it will be used later quite often and is central to many quantum phenomena.

Consider two observables ${\mathcal {O}}_{1}\,\!$ and ${\mathcal {O}}_{2}\,\!$. The variance of these can be written as

	$\sigma _{i}^{2}=\left\langle \Psi \right\vert ({\mathcal {O}}_{i}-\langle {\mathcal {O}}_{i}\rangle )^{2}\left\vert \Psi \right\rangle ,\,\!$	(5.4)

for $i=1,2\,\!$. The uncertainty principle is

	$\sigma _{1}^{2}\sigma _{2}^{2}\geq \left({\frac {1}{2i}}\langle [{\mathcal {O}}_{1},{\mathcal {O}}_{2}]\rangle \right)^{2}.\,\!$	(5.5)