Unitary-invariant witnesses of quantum imaginarity

Abstract

Quantum theory is traditionally formulated using complex numbers. This imaginarity of quantum theory has been quantified as a resource with applications in discrimination tasks, pseudorandomness generation, and quantum metrology. Here we propose witnesses for imaginarity that are basis-independent, relying on measurements of unitary-invariant properties of sets of states. For 3 pure states, we completely characterize the invariant values attainable by quantum theory, and give a partial characterization for 4 pure states. We show that simple pairwise overlap measurements suffice to witness imaginarity of sets of 4 states, but not for sets of 3. Our witnesses are experimentally friendly, opening up a new path for measuring and using imaginarity as a resource.

4+6 pages, 1 figure

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Quantifying imaginarity in terms of pure-state imaginarity
• Expectation value dynamics within real Hilbert space quantum mechanics
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• Geometry of sets of Bargmann invariants
• Certifying nonstabilizerness in quantum processors
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