The rate of purification of quantum trajectories

Abstract

We investigate the behavior of quantum trajectories conditioned on measurement outcomes. Under a condition related to the absence of so-called dark subspaces, Kümmerer and Maassen had shown that such trajectories almost surely purify in the long run. In this article, we first present a simple alternative proof of this result using Lyapunov methods. We then strengthen the conclusion by proving that purification actually occurs at an exponential rate in expectation, again using a Lyapunov approach. Furthermore, we address the quantum state estimation problem by propagating two trajectories under the same measurement record--one from the true initial state and the other from an arbitrary initial guess--and show that the estimated trajectory converges exponentially fast to the true one, thus quantifying the rate at which information is progressively revealed through the measurement process.