Following Ollivier's work [61], we introduce the coarse Ricci curvature of a quantum channel as the contraction coefficient of non-commutative metrics on the state space. These metrics are defined as a non-commutative transportation cost in the spirit of [42,41], which gives a unified approach to different quantum Wasserstein distances in the literature. We prove that the coarse Ricci curvature lower bound and its dual gradient estimate, under suitable assumptions, imply the Poincare inequality (spectral gap) as well as transportation cost inequalities. Using intertwining relations, we obtain positive coarse Ricci curvature bounds of Gibbs samplers, Bosonic beam-splitters as well as Pauli channels on n-qubits.

Given a finite-range, translation-invariant commuting system Hamiltonian on a spin chain, we show that the Davies semigroup describing the reduced dynamics resulting from the joint Hamiltonian evolution of a spin chain weakly coupled to a large heat bath thermalizes rapidly at any temperature. More precisely, we prove that the relative entropy between any evolved state and the equilibrium Gibbs state contracts exponentially fast with an exponent that scales logarithmically with the length of the chain. Our theorem extends a seminal result of Holley and Stroock (Commun Math Phys 123(1):85-93, 1989) to the quantum setting as well as provides an exponential improvement over the non-closure of the gap proved by Brandao and Kastoryano (Commun Math Phys 344(3):915-957, 2016). This has wide-ranging applications to the study of many-body in and out-of-equilibrium quantum systems. Our proof relies upon a recently derived strong decay of correlations for Gibbs states of one dimensional, translation-invariant local Hamiltonians, and tools from the theory of operator spaces.

Differential privacy has been an exceptionally successful concept when it comes to providing provable security guarantees for classical computations. More recently, the concept was generalized to quantum computations. While classical computations are essentially noiseless and differential privacy is often achieved by artificially adding noise, near-term quantum computers are inherently noisy and it was observed that this leads to natural differential privacy as a feature. In this work we discuss quantum differential privacy in an information theoretic framework by casting it as a quantum divergence. A main advantage of this approach is that differential privacy becomes a property solely based on the output states of the computation, without the need to check it for every measurement. This leads to simpler proofs and generalized statements of its properties as well as several new bounds for both, general and specific, noise models. In particular, these include common representations of quantum circuits and quantum machine learning concepts. Here, we focus on the difference in the amount of noise required to achieve certain levels of differential privacy versus the amount that would make any computation useless. Finally, we also generalize the classical concepts of local differential privacy, Renyi differential privacy and the hypothesis testing interpretation to the quantum setting, providing several new properties and insights.

In open quantum systems, the quantum Zeno effect consists in frequent applications of a given quantum operation, e.g., a measurement, used to restrict the time evolution (due, for example, to decoherence) to states that are invariant under the quantum operation. In an abstract setting, the Zeno sequence is an alternating concatenation of a contraction operator (quantum operation) and a C-0-contraction semigroup (time evolution) on a Banach space. In this paper, we prove the optimal convergence rate O(1/n) of the Zeno sequence by proving explicit error bounds. For that, we derive a new Chernoff-type root n-Lemma, which we believe to be of independent interest. Moreover, we generalize the convergence result for the Zeno effect in two directions: We weaken the assumptions on the generator, inducing the Zeno dynamics generated by an unbounded generator, and we improve the convergence to the uniform topology. Finally, we provide a large class of examples arising from our assumptions.

We generalize Holley-Stroock's perturbation argument from commutative to finite dimensional quantum Markov semigroups. As a consequence, results on (complete) modified logarithmic Sobolev inequalities and logarithmic Sobolev inequalities for self-adjoint quantum Markov processes can be used to prove estimates on the exponential convergence in relative entropy of quantum Markov systems which preserve a fixed state. This leads to estimates for the decay to equilibrium for coupled systems and to estimates for mixed state preparation times using Lindblad operators. Our techniques also apply to discrete time settings, where we show that the strong data processing inequality constant of a quantum channel can be controlled by that of a corresponding unital channel.

We prove that spin chains weakly coupled to a large heat bath thermalize rapidly at any temperature for finite-range, translation-invariant commuting Hamiltonians, reaching equilibrium in a time which scales logarithmically with the system size. This generalizes to the quantum regime a seminal result of Holley and Stroock from 1989 for classical spin chains and represents an exponential improvement over previous bounds based on the nonclosure of the spectral gap. We discuss the implications in the context of dissipative phase transitions and in the study of symmetry protected topological phases.

The impressive progress in quantum hardware of the last years has raised the interest of the quantum computing community in harvesting the computational power of such devices. However, in the absence of error correction, these devices can only reliably implement very shallow circuits or comparatively deeper circuits at the expense of a nontrivial density of errors. In this work, we obtain extremely tight limitation bounds for standard noisy intermediate-scale quantum proposals in both the noisy and noise-less regimes, with or without error-mitigation tools. The bounds limit the performance of both circuit model algorithms, such as the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and also continuous-time algorithms, such as quantum annealing. In the noisy regime with local depolarizing noise p, we prove that at depths L = O(p-1) it is exponentially unlikely that the outcome of a noisy quantum circuit out-performs efficient classical algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems like max-cut. Although previous results already showed that classical algorithms outperform noisy quantum circuits at constant depth, these results only held for the expectation value of the output. Our results are based on newly developed quantum entropic and concentration inequalities, which constitute a homogeneous toolkit of theoretical methods from the quantum theory of optimal mass transport whose potential usefulness goes beyond the study of variational quantum algorithms.

The data processing inequality is the most basic requirement for any meaningful measure of information. It essentially states that distinguishability measures between states decrease if we apply a quantum channel and is the centerpiece of many results in information theory. Moreover, it justifies the operational interpretation of most entropic quantities. In this work, we revisit the notion of contraction coefficients of quantum channels, which provide sharper and specialized versions of the data processing inequality. A concept closely related to data processing is partial orders on quantum channels. First, we discuss several quantum extensions of the well-known less noisy ordering and relate them to contraction coefficients. We further define approximate versions of the partial orders and show how they can give strengthened and conceptually simple proofs of several results on approximating capacities. Moreover, we investigate the relation to other partial orders in the literature and their properties, particularly with regards to tensorization. We then examine the relation between contraction coefficients with other properties of quantum channels such as hypercontractivity. Next, we extend the framework of contraction coefficients to general f-divergences and prove several structural results. Finally, we consider two important classes of quantum channels, namely Weyl-covariant and bosonic Gaussian channels. For those, we determine new contraction coefficients and relations for various partial orders.

We provide a stochastic interpretation of non-commutative Dirichlet forms in the context of quantum filtering. For stochastic processes motivated by quantum optics experiments, we derive an optimal finite time deviation bound expressed in terms of the non-commutative Dirichlet form. Introducing and developing new non -commutative functional inequalities, we deduce concentration inequalities for these processes. Examples satisfying our bounds include tensor products of quantum Markov semigroups as well as Gibbs samplers above a threshold temperature.

We prove that every GNS-symmetric quantum Markov semigroup on a finite dimensional matrix algebra satisfies a modified log-Sobolev inequality. In the discrete time setting, we prove that every finite dimensional GNS-symmetric quantum channel satisfies a strong data processing inequality with respect to its decoherence free part. Moreover, we establish the first general approximate tensorization property of the relative entropy. This extends the famous strong subadditivity of the quantum entropy (SSA) of two subsystems to the general setting of two subalgebras. All three results are independent of the size of the environment and hence satisfy the tensorization property. They are obtained via a common, conceptually simple method for proving entropic inequalities via spectral or L-2-estimates. As an application, we combine our results on the modified log-Sobolev inequality and approximate tensorization to derive tight bounds for local generators.

In this paper, we derive a new generalisation of the strong subadditivity of the entropy to the setting of general conditional expectations onto arbitrary finite-dimensional von Neumann algebras. This generalisation, referred to as approximate tensorization of the relative entropy, consists in a lower bound for the sum of relative entropies between a given density and its respective projections onto two intersecting von Neumann algebras in terms of the relative entropy between the same density and its projection onto an algebra in the intersection, up to multiplicative and additive constants. In particular, our inequality reduces to the so-called quasi-factorization of the entropy for commuting algebras, which is a key step in modern proofs of the logarithmic Sobolev inequality for classical lattice spin systems. We also provide estimates on the constants in terms of conditions of clustering of correlations in the setting of quantum lattice spin systems. Along the way, we show the equivalence between conditional expectations arising from Petz recovery maps and those of general Davies semigroups.

Given a uniform, frustration-free family of local Lindbladians defined on a quantum lattice spin system in any spatial dimension, we prove a strong exponential convergence in relative entropy of the system to equilibrium under a condition of spatial mixing of the stationary Gibbs states and the rapid decay of the relative entropy on finite-size blocks. Our result leads to the first examples of the positivity of the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality for quantum lattice spin systems independently of the system size. Moreover, we show that our notion of spatial mixing is a consequence of the recent quantum generalization of Dobrushin and Shlosman's complete analyticity of the free-energy at equilibrium. The latter typically holds above a critical temperature Tc. Our results have wide-ranging applications in quantum information. As an illustration, we discuss four of them: first, using techniques of quantum optimal transport, we show that a quantum annealer subject to a finite range classical noise will output an energy close to that of the fixed point after constant annealing time. Second, we prove Gaussian concentration inequalities for Lipschitz observables and show that the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis holds for certain high-temperture Gibbs states. Third, we prove a finite blocklength refinement of the quantum Stein lemma for the task of asymmetric discrimination of two Gibbs states of commuting Hamiltonians satisfying our conditions. Fourth, in the same setting, our results imply the existence of a local quantum circuit of logarithmic depth to prepare Gibbs states of a class of commuting Hamiltonians.

The mixing time of Markovian dissipative evolutions of open quantum many-body systems can be bounded using optimal constants of certain quantum functional inequalities, such as the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant. For classical spin systems, the positivity of such constants follows from a mixing condition for the Gibbs measure via quasi-factorization results for the entropy. Inspired by the classical case, we present a strategy to derive the positivity of the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant associated with the dynamics of certain quantum systems from some clustering conditions on the Gibbs state of a local, commuting Hamiltonian. In particular, we show that for the heat-bath dynamics of 1D systems, the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant is positive under the assumptions of a mixing condition on the Gibbs state and a strong quasi-factorization of the relative entropy.

We investigate the energy-constrained (EC) diamond norm distance between unitary channels acting on possibly infinite-dimensional quantum systems, and establish a number of results. First, we prove that optimal EC discrimination between two unitary channels does not require the use of any entanglement. Extending a result by Acín, we also show that a finite number of parallel queries suffices to achieve zero error discrimination even in this EC setting. Second, we employ EC diamond norms to study a novel type of quantum speed limits, which apply to pairs of quantum dynamical semigroups. We expect these results to be relevant for benchmarking internal dynamics of quantum devices. Third, we establish a version of the Solovay-Kitaev theorem that applies to the group of Gaussian unitaries over a finite number of modes, with the approximation error being measured with respect to the EC diamond norm relative to the photon number Hamiltonian.

Capacities of quantum channels and decoherence times both quantify the extent to which quantum information can withstand degradation by interactions with its environment. However, calculating capacities directly is known to be intractable in general. Much recent work has focused on upper bounding certain capacities in terms of more tractable quantities such as specific norms from operator theory. In the meantime, there has also been substantial recent progress on estimating decoherence times with techniques from analysis and geometry, even though many hard questions remain open. In this article, we introduce a class of continuous-time quantum channels that we called transferred channels, which are built through representation theory from a classical Markov kernel defined on a compact group. In particular, we study two subclasses of such kernels: Hormander systems on compact Lie-groups and Markov chains on finite groups. Examples of transferred channels include the depolarizing channel, the dephasing channel, and collective decoherence channels acting on d qubits. Some of the estimates presented are new, such as those for channels that randomly swap subsystems. We then extend tools developed in earlier work by Gao, Junge and LaRacuente to transfer estimates of the classical Markov kernel to the transferred channels and study in this way different non-commutative functional inequalities. The main contribution of this article is the application of this transference principle to the estimation of decoherence time, of private and quantum capacities, of entanglement-assisted classical capacities as well as estimation of entanglement breaking times, defined as the first time for which the channel becomes entanglement breaking. Moreover, our estimates hold for nonergodic channels such as the collective decoherence channels, an important scenario that has been overlooked so far because of a lack of techniques.

Various quantum analogues of the central limit theorem, which is one of the cornerstones of probability theory, are known in the literature. One such analogue, due to Cushen and Hudson, is of particular relevance for quantum optics. It implies that the state in any single output arm of an n-splitter, which is fed with n copies of a centred state rho with finite second moments, converges to the Gaussian state with the same first and second moments as rho. Here we exploit the phase space formalism to carry out a refined analysis of the rate of convergence in this quantum central limit theorem. For instance, we prove that the convergence takes place at a rate O(n(-1/2)) in the Hilbert-Schmidt norm whenever the third moments of rho are finite. Trace norm or relative entropy bounds can be obtained by leveraging the energy boundedness of the state. Via analytical and numerical examples we show that our results are tight in many respects. An extension of our proof techniques to the non-i.i.d. setting is used to analyse a new model of a lossy optical fibre, where a given m-mode state enters a cascade of n beam splitters of equal transmissivities lambda(1/n) fed with an arbitrary (but fixed) environment state. Assuming that the latter has finite third moments, and ignoring unitaries, we show that the effective channel converges in diamond norm to a simple thermal attenuator, with a rate O(n(-1/2(m+1))). This allows us to establish bounds on the classical and quantum capacities of the cascade channel. Along the way, we derive several results that may be of independent interest. For example, we prove that any quantum characteristic function chi(rho) is uniformly bounded by some eta(rho) < 1 outside of any neighbourhood of the origin,. also, eta(rho) can be made to depend only on the energy of the state rho.

In this paper, we develop the first method for finding strong converse bounds in quantum network information theory. The general scheme relies on a recently obtained result in the field of non-commutative functional inequalities, namely the tensorization property of quantum reverse hypercontractivity for the quantum depolarizing semigroup. We develop a novel technique to employ this result to find both finite blocklength and exponential strong converse bounds for the tasks of quantum source coding with compressed classical side information, and distributed quantum hypothesis testing with communication constraints for a classical-quantum state. In the classical setting, these two problems can be reformulated in a unified framework in terms of the so-called image-size characterization problem, which we extend to the classical-quantum setting. We also use this technique to establish analogous strong converse bounds in broadcast communication scenarios. In particular, we consider the transmission of classical information through a degraded broadcast channel, whose outputs are two quantum systems, with the state of one being a degraded version of the other. In establishing this last result, we prove a second-order Fano-type inequality, which is of independent interest. Our method to study strong converses has potential applications in other important tasks of quantum network information theory.

Quantum Markov semigroups characterize the time evolution of an important class of open quantum systems. Studying convergence properties of such a semigroup and determining concentration properties of its invariant state have been the focus of much research. Quantum versions of functional inequalities (like the modified logarithmic Sobolev and Poincare inequalities) and the so-called transportation cost inequalities have proved to be essential for this purpose. Classical functional and transportation cost inequalities are seen to arise from a single geometric inequality, called the Ricci lower bound, via an inequality which interpolates between them. The latter is called the HWI inequality, where the letters I, W and H are, respectively, acronyms for the Fisher information (arising in the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality), the so-called Wasserstein distance (arising in the transportation cost inequality) and the relative entropy (or Boltzmann H function) arising in both. Hence, classically, the above inequalities and the implications between them form a remarkable picture which relates elements from diverse mathematical fields, such as Riemannian geometry, information theory, optimal transport theory, Markov processes, concentration of measure and convexity theory. Here, we consider a quantum version of the Ricci lower bound introduced by Carlen and Maas and prove that it implies a quantum HWI inequality from which the quantum functional and transportation cost inequalities follow. Our results hence establish that the unifying picture of the classical setting carries over to the quantum one.

In this paper we develop the theory of quantum reverse hypercontractivity inequalities and show how they can be derived from log-Sobolev inequalities. Next we prove a generalization of the Stroock–Varopoulos inequality in the non-commutative setting which allows us to derive quantum hypercontractivity and reverse hypercontractivity inequalities solely from 2-log-Sobolev and 1-log-Sobolev inequalities respectively. We then prove some tensorization-type results providing us with tools to prove hypercontractivity and reverse hypercontractivity not only for certain quantum superoperators but also for their tensor powers. Finally as an application of these results, we generalize a recent technique for proving strong converse bounds in information theory via reverse hypercontractivity inequalities to the quantum setting. We prove strong converse bounds for the problems of quantum hypothesis testing and classical-quantum channel coding based on the quantum reverse hypercontractivity inequalities that we derive.