Speed limits in Liouville space for open quantum systems

Fritz Haber Research Center for Molecular Dynamics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem 9190401, Israel

^(a) raam@mail.huji.ac.il

Received: 28 June 2016
Accepted: 30 August 2016

Abstract

One of the defining properties of an open quantum system is the variation of its purity in time. We derive speed limits on the rate of purity change for systems coupled to a Markovian environment. Our speed limits are based on Liouville space where density matrices are represented as vectors. This approach leads to speed limits that are always tighter compared to their parallel speed limits in Hilbert space. These bounds depend solely on the generators of the nonunitary dynamics and are independent of the particular state of the systems. Thus, they are perfectly suited to investigate dephasing, thermalization, and decorrelation processes of arbitrary states. We show that our speed limits can be attained and are therefore tight. As an application of our results we study dephasing of interacting spins, and the speed of classical and quantum correlation erasure in multi-particle system.