Unambiguous discrimination of mixed states: A description based on system-ancilla coupling

Abstract

We propose a general description on the unambiguous discrimination of mixed states according to the system-environment coupling, and present a procedure to reduce this to a standard semidefinite programming problem. In the two states case, we introduce the canonical vectors and partly simplify the problem to the case of discrimination between pairs of canonical vectors. By considering the positivity of the two by two matrices, we obtain a series of new upper bounds of the total success probability which depends on both the prior probabilities and specific state structures.

6 pages, 1 table, added some examples

References in corpus (3)

• Unambiguous discrimination of mixed states
• Optimal unambiguous discrimination of two subspaces as a case in mixed state discrimination
• Physical accessible transformations on a finite number of quantum states

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Minimum-error discrimination between mixed quantum states
• Optimal bounded-error strategies for projective measurements in non-orthogonal state discrimination
• Discrimination of two mixed quantum states with maximum confidence and minimum probability of inconclusive results
• Optimal unambiguous state discrimination of two density matrices: A second class of exact solutions
• Commutator Relations Reveal Solvable Structures in Unambiguous State Discrimination