Roughness as Classicality Indicator of a Quantum State

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Roughness, a new continuous measure of classicality for quantum states based on Wigner and Husimi functions, useful for state comparison and quantum dynamics analysis.

Contribution

It defines the Roughness as a novel classicality indicator, explores its properties across various quantum states, and proposes the Dynamic Distance Measure to assess quantum dynamics.

Findings

Roughness is bounded and varies continuously from 0 (classical) to 1 (quantum).

Maximum Roughness occurs for large photon number Fock states and squeezed states.

Roughness effectively discriminates between pure and mixed states.

Abstract

We define a new quantifier of classicality for a quantum state, the Roughness, which is given by the $\mathcal{L}^2 (\R^2)$ distance between Wigner and Husimi functions. We show that the Roughness is bounded and therefore it is a useful tool for comparison between different quantum states for single bosonic systems. The state classification via the Roughness is not binary, but rather it is continuous in the interval [0,1], being the state more classic as the Roughness approaches to zero, and more quantum when it is closer to the unity. The Roughness is maximum for Fock states when its number of photons is arbitrarily large, and also for squeezed states at the maximum compression limit. On the other hand, the Roughness reaches its minimum value for thermal states at infinite temperature and, more generally, for infinite entropy states. The Roughness of a coherent state is slightly below one half, so we may say that it is more a classical state than a quantum one. Another important result is that the Roughness performs well for discriminating both pure and mixed states. Since the Roughness measures the inherent quantumness of a state, we propose another function, the Dynamic Distance Measure (DDM), which is suitable for measure how much quantum is a dynamics. Using DDM, we studied the quartic oscillator, and we observed that there is a certain complementarity between dynamics and state, i.e. when dynamics becomes more quantum, the Roughness of the state decreases, while the Roughness grows as the dynamics becomes less quantum.