Wootters' distance revisited: a new distinguishability criterium

The Jensen-Shannon divergence has been successfully applied as a segmentation tool for symbolic sequences, that is to separate the sequence into subsequences with the same symbolic content. In this work, we propose a method, based on the the Jensen-Shannon divergence, for segmentation of what we call \textit{quantum generated sequences}, which consist in symbolic sequences generated from measuring a quantum system. For one-qubit and two-qubit systems, we show that the propose...

We study in detail a very natural metric for quantum states. This new proposal has two basic ingredients: entropy and purification. The metric for two mixed states is defined as the square root of the entropy of the average of representative purifications of those states. Some basic properties are analyzed and its relation with other distances is investigated. As an illustrative application, the proposed metric is evaluated for 1-qubit mixed states.

We provide a compendium of inequalities between several quantum state distinguishability measures. For each measure these inequalities consist of the sharpest possible upper and lower bounds in terms of another measure. Some of these inequalities are already known, but new or more general proofs are given, whereas other inequalities are new. We also supply cases of equality to show that all inequalities are indeed the sharpest possible.

We analyze two ways to obtain distinguishability measures between quantum maps by employing the square root of the quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence, which forms a true distance in the space of density operators. The arising measures are the transmission distance between quantum channels and the entropic channel divergence. We investigate their mathematical properties and discuss their physical meaning. Additionally, we establish a chain rule for the entropic channel divergen...

We study the time evolution of four distance measures in the presence of initial systemenvironment correlations. It is well-known that the trace distance between two quantum states of an open system may increase due to initial correlations which leads to a breakdown of the contractivity of the reduced dynamics. Here we compare and analyze, for two different models, the time evolution of the trace distance, the Bures metric, the Hellinger distance and the Jensen-Shannon diverg...

We argue from the point of view of statistical inference that the quantum relative entropy is a good measure for distinguishing between two quantum states (or two classes of quantum states) described by density matrices. We extend this notion to describe the amount of entanglement between two quantum systems from a statistical point of view. Our measure is independent of the number of entangled systems and their dimensionality.

In a recent paper, a "distance" function, \cal D, was defined which measures the distance between pure classical and quantum systems. In this work, we present a new definition of a "distance", D, which measures the distance between either pure or impure classical and quantum states. We also compare the new distance formula with the previous formula, when the latter is applicable. To illustrate these distances, we have used 2 \times 2 matrix examples and 2-dimensional vectors ...

Logical information theory is the quantitative version of the logic of partitions just as logical probability theory is the quantitative version of the dual Boolean logic of subsets. The resulting notion of information is about distinctions, differences, and distinguishability, and is formalized using the distinctions (`dits') of a partition (a pair of points distinguished by the partition). All the definitions of simple, joint, conditional, and mutual entropy of Shannon info...

The performance of a quantum information processing protocol is ultimately judged by distinguishability measures that quantify how distinguishable the actual result of the protocol is from the ideal case. The most prominent distinguishability measures are those based on the fidelity and trace distance, due to their physical interpretations. In this paper, we propose and review several algorithms for estimating distinguishability measures based on trace distance and fidelity. ...

The scheme for construction of distances, presented in the previous paper quant-ph/0005087, v.1 (Ref. 1) is amended. The formulation of Proposition 1 of Ref. 1 does not ensure the triangle inequality, therefore some of the functionals D(a,b) in Ref. 1 are in fact quasi-distances. In this note we formulate sufficient conditions for a functional D(a,b) of the (squared) form D(a,b)^2 = f(a)^2 + f(b)^2 - 2f(a)f(b)g(a,b) to be a distance and provide some examples of such distances...