1.School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China 2.Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China 3.School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Fund Project:Project supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing, China (Grant No. 1174017), the Young Scientists Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11605006), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11875317), the National Center for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China (Grant No. Y029152K51), and the Key Laboratory of Random Complex Structures and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China (Grant No. 2008DP173182).
Received Date:27 September 2018
Accepted Date:12 December 2018
Available Online:01 February 2019
Published Online:05 February 2019
Abstract:Coherence and complementarity are two important themes in quantum mechanics, which have been widely and thoroughly investigated. Recently, with the rapid development of quantum information theory, various measures have been introduced for quantitatively studying the coherence and complementarity. However, most of these studies are independent of each other in that they focus on only one theme, for example, the wave-particle duality and Heisenberg uncertainty principle are usually regarded as manifestation of Bohr’s complementary principle, while coherence is a quantum feature closely related to quantum superposition. During the past few years, there has been a flurry of research interest in the study of quantum coherence from the quantum resource-theoretic point of view. In this paper, we establish two information conservation relations and employ them to characterize complementarity and quantum coherence. As an illustration of the main results, we discuss these two themes in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Our study reveals that these two quantum themes are closely related to each other. Our main results are listed as follows. Firstly, we establish two information conservation relations, one is based on " Bures distance versus fidelity” and the other based on " symmetry versus asymmetry”. Then we employ these information conservation relations to investigate coherence and complementarity. Specifically, we provide an explanation of the " Bures distance versus fidelity” trade-off relation from the information conservation perspective, establish the link between the information conservation relation and wave-particle duality, and derive the famous Englert inequality concerning " fringe visibility versus path distinguishability” from the information conservation relation. Furthermore, in the general framework of state-channel interaction, we derive " symmetry versus asymmetry” trade-off relation and explain it as an information conservation relation, reveal its intrinsic relations with coherence and complementarity. Lastly, we demonstrate that the two information conservation relations are closely interrelated, and we also discuss the coherence, decoherence and complementarity in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, explicitly, we reveal that the Bures distance can be regarded as a lower bound of the asymmetry of state-channel interaction while fidelity is an upper bound of the symmetry of state-channel interaction. We expect that our information conservation relation can provide a unified framework for the study of coherence and complementarity. Keywords:coherence/ complementary/ information conservation/ Mach-Zehnder interferometer