1302.3865 (Elliott H. Lieb et al.)

Upper bounds on mixing rates    [PDF]

Elliott H. Lieb, Anna Vershynina

We prove upper bounds on the rate, called "mixing rate", at which the von Neumann entropy of the expected density operator of a given ensemble of states changes under non-local unitary evolution. For an ensemble consisting of two states, with probabilities of p and 1-p, we prove that the mixing rate is bounded above by 4\sqrt{p(1-p)} for any Hamiltonian of norm 1. For a general ensemble of states with probabilities distributed according to a random variable X and individually evolving according to any set of bounded Hamiltonians, we conjecture that the mixing rate is bounded above by a Shannon entropy of a random variable X. For this general case we prove an upper bound that is independent of the dimension of the Hilbert space on which states in the ensemble act.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3865