Distinguishing pure and thermal states by Landauer’s principle in open systems

Abstract

Starting from Polchinski’s thought experiment on how to distinguish between pure and thermal states, we construct a specific system to study the interaction between qubit and cavity quantum field theory (QFT) in order to provide a more operational point of view. Without imposing any restrictions on the initial states of qubit and cavity QFT, we compute the evolution of the system order by order by the perturbation method. We choose Landauer’s principle, an important bound in quantum computation and quantum measurement, as the basis for the determination of the thermal state. By backtracking the initial state form, we obtain the conditions that must be satisfied by the cavity QFT: the expectation value of the annihilation operator should be zero, and the expectation value of the particle number operator should satisfy the Bose–Einstein distribution. We also discuss the difference between the thermal state and a possible alternative to the thermal state: the canonical thermal pure quantum (CTPQ) state.