Quantum Darwinism: Amplification and the Acquisition of Information by Spin Environments
- Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, OR (United States) Dept. of Physics
- IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY (United States). Thomas J. Watson Research Center
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Quantum Darwinism recognizes the role of the environment as a communication channel: Decoherence can amplify select information – information about the pointer states of a system of interest (preventing access to complementary information about superpositions of those states). We examine the amplification process for a spin environment under a variety of conditions. For initially pure environment states, the contribution to decoherence and the partial record deposited in an environment spin are both determined by the overlap of conditional states generated on the spin. For mixed environments, however, decoherence and a partial record are no longer directly related. The partial record, though, is given by a generalized measure of overlap – the quantum Chernoff information. The latter quantity is a measure of distinguishability and gives the efficiency of the amplification process. We calculate the Chernoff information and show explicitly that, except for a set of measure zero, there is always redundant information acquired by the environment.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1136936
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-14-25093
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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