Fidelity between a bipartite state and another one undergoing local unitary dynamics

Abstract

The fidelity and local unitary transformation are two widely useful notions in quantum physics. We study two constrained optimization problems in terms of the maximal and minimal fidelity between two bipartite quantum states undergoing local unitary dynamics. The problems are related to the geometric measure of entanglement and the distillability problem. We show that the problems can be reduced to semi-definite programming optimization problems. We give close-form formulae of the fidelity when the two states are both pure states, or a pure product state and the Werner state. We explain from the point of view of local unitary actions that why the entanglement in Werner states is hard to accessible. For general mixed states, we give upper and lower bounds of the fidelity using tools such as affine fidelity, channels and relative entropy from information theory. We also investigate the power of local unitaries and quantification for the commutativity of quantum states, and the equivalence of the two optimization problems.

v1: 6 pages, Revtex4-1, no figure. Any comments or remarks are welcome! v2:7 pages, a few minor errors in an early version of this paper are fixed; and two new propostions are added as well. v3:14 pages, some examples are added. v4: 14 pages, minor revisions are made. Final version for publication in Quantum Information Processing