Dark Subspaces and Invariant Measures of Quantum Trajectories

TL;DR

This paper classifies invariant measures of quantum trajectories, revealing their structure through dark subspaces and unitary group orbits, advancing understanding of quantum system evolution under measurements.

Contribution

It provides a complete classification of invariant measures for quantum trajectories, including their uniqueness on dark subspaces and characterization via unitary group orbits.

Findings

Unique invariant measure on dark subspaces.

Invariant measures are indexed by unitary group orbits.

Complete classification of quantum trajectory invariant measures.

Abstract

Quantum trajectories are Markov processes describing the evolution of a quantum system subject to indirect measurements. They can be viewed as place dependent iterated function systems or the result of products of dependent and non identically distributed random matrices. In this article, we establish a complete classification of their invariant measures. The classification is done in two steps. First, we prove a Markov process on some linear subspaces called dark subspaces, defined in (Maassen, K\"ummerer 2006), admits a unique invariant measure. Second, we study the process inside the dark subspaces. Using a notion of minimal family of isometries from a reference space to dark subspaces, we prove a set of measures indexed by orbits of a unitary group is the set of ergodic measures of quantum trajectories.