On the pseudo-manifold of quantum states

DOI10.1016/J.DIFGEO.2021.101800MaRDI QIDQ1979415zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Francesco D'Andrea, Davide Franco

Publication date 2 September 2021

Published in Differential Geometry and its Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04488

zbMATH Keywords

geometry of quantum mechanicsquantum states

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Noncommutative differential geometry (46L87) Stratifications in topological manifolds (57N80) Quantum state spaces, operational and probabilistic concepts (81P16) Noncommutative geometry in quantum theory (81R60)

Abstract: There are various statements in the physics literature about the stratification of quantum states, for example into orbits of a unitary group, and about generalized differentiable structures on it. Our aim is to clarify and make precise some of these statements. For A an arbitrary finite-dimensional C*-algebra and U(A) the group of unitary elements of A, we observe that the partition of the state space S(A) into U(A) orbits is not a decomposition and that the decomposition into orbit types is not a stratification (its pieces are not manifolds without boundary), while there is a natural Whitney stratification into matrices of fixed rank. For the latter, when A is a full matrix algebra, we give an explicit description of the pseudo-manifold structure (the conical neighborhood around any point). We then make some comments about the infinite-dimensional case.

Review text

This paper concerns the differential geometry of the state space of (mainly finite dimensional) quantum systems. As the authors claim in the abstract and in the introduction, their aim is to give a clear mathematical framework to the geometry of states in quantum mechanics. I am happy to say that they were quite successful in this regard: they took good care of providing all the geometrical and algebraic tools needed for this topic, accompanying each definition with a good reference. These tools were then deployed to prove many of the statements usually presented as folklore in the mathematical-physics literature. In the first section, after introducing the standard notions of states and density matrices for a (finite dimensional) C* algebra, the authors recall the theory of stratified spaces, with particular regard for manifolds stratified by the smooth action of a Lie group. In the second section the authors study the topology of the space of states of a finite dimensional C* algebra, showing thay it exhibits the topology of the disjoint union of a finite number of complex projective spaces. An important proposition proved in this section concerns the stratification of the join of two stratified spaces. The third section is a collection of examples that are meant to show the stratification by rank of the space of matrices induced by the adjoint action of the unitary group. In the fourth section the authors give two descriptions of the topological pseudo manifold of the states of a C* algebra of complex matrices, whose strata are smooth manifolds. It turns out that every stratum is the total space of a smooth bundle on an algebraic smooth variety, while a neighborhood of each stratum has the structure of a cone bundle over the stratum, which is contained in the total space of a smooth vector bundle on an algebraic smooth variety. Finally in the closing remarks, some possible future developments are presented. The topic of the paper is very interesting and the paper itself is very well written.

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Cited in

(6)

• Manifolds of classical probability distributions and quantum density operators in infinite dimensions
• Stratified manifold of quantum states, actions of the complex special linear group
• Dynamical vector fields on the manifold of quantum states
• Parametric models and information geometry on \(W^\star\)-algebras
• G-dual teleparallel connections in information geometry
• Monotone metric tensors in quantum information geometry

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