Quantum processes

A number of ideas and questions related to the construction of quantum processes are discussed. Quantum state extension, entanglement and asymptotic behaviour of the entropy are some of the issues explored. These topics are studied in more detail for a class of quantum processes known as finitely correlated states. Several examples of such processes are presented, specifically a Free Fermionic model.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 46th Karpacz Winter School of Theoretical Physics "Quantum Dynamics and Information: Theory and Experiment

On the Sensitivity of Noncoherent Capacity to the Channel Model

The noncoherent capacity of stationary discrete-time fading channels is known to be very sensitive to the fine details of the channel model. More specifically, the measure of the set of harmonics where the power spectral density of the fading process is nonzero determines if capacity grows logarithmically in SNR or slower than logarithmically. An engineering-relevant problem is to characterize the SNR value at which this sensitivity starts to matter. In this paper, we consider the general class of continuous-time Rayleigh-fading channels that satisfy the wide-sense stationary uncorrelated-scattering (WSSUS) assumption and are, in addition, underspread. For this class of channels, we show that the noncoherent capacity is close to the AWGN capacity for all SNR values of practical interest, independently of whether the scattering function is compactly supported or not. As a byproduct of our analysis, we obtain an information-theoretic pulse-design criterion for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems.Comment: To be presented at IEEE Int. Symp. Inf. Theory 2009, Seoul, Kore

A polynomial fit preconditioner for band Toeplitz matrices in image reconstruction

The Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient is often applied in image reconstruction as a regularizing method. When the blurring matrix has Toeplitz structure, the modified circulant preconditioner and the inverse Toeplitz preconditioner have been shown to be effective. We introduce here a preconditioner for symmetric positive definite Toeplitz matrices based on a trigonometric polynomial fit which has the same effectiveness of the previous ones but has a lower cost when applied to band matrices. The case of band block Toeplitz matrices with band Toeplitz blocks (BTTB) corresponding to separable point spread functions is also considered

Regularizing preconditioners based on fit techniques in the image reconstruction problem

Regularizing preconditioners for the approximate solution by gradient-type methods of image restoration problems with two-level band Toeplitz structure, are examined. For problems having separable and positive definite matrices, the fit preconditioner, introduced in [6], has been shown to be effective in conjunction with CG. The cost of this preconditioner is of O(n^2) operations per iteration, where n^2 is the pixels number of the image, whereas the cost of the circulant preconditioners commonly used for this type of problems is of O(n^2 log n) operations per iteration. In this paper the extension of the fit preconditioner to more general cases is proposed: namely the nonseparable positive definite case and the symmetric indefinite case are treated. The major difficulty encountered in this extension concerns the factorization phase, where, unlike the separable case, a further approximation is required. Various approximate factorizations are proposed. The preconditioners thus obtained have still a cost of O(n^2) operations per iteration. A large numerical experimentation compares these preconditioners with the circulant Chan preconditioner, showing often better performances at a lower cost

On the Sensitivity of Continuous-Time Noncoherent Fading Channel Capacity

The noncoherent capacity of stationary discrete-time fading channels is known to be very sensitive to the fine details of the channel model. More specifically, the measure of the support of the fading-process power spectral density (PSD) determines if noncoherent capacity grows logarithmically in SNR or slower than logarithmically. Such a result is unsatisfactory from an engineering point of view, as the support of the PSD cannot be determined through measurements. The aim of this paper is to assess whether, for general continuous-time Rayleigh-fading channels, this sensitivity has a noticeable impact on capacity at SNR values of practical interest. To this end, we consider the general class of band-limited continuous-time Rayleigh-fading channels that satisfy the wide-sense stationary uncorrelated-scattering (WSSUS) assumption and are, in addition, underspread. We show that, for all SNR values of practical interest, the noncoherent capacity of every channel in this class is close to the capacity of an AWGN channel with the same SNR and bandwidth, independently of the measure of the support of the scattering function (the two-dimensional channel PSD). Our result is based on a lower bound on noncoherent capacity, which is built on a discretization of the channel input-output relation induced by projecting onto Weyl-Heisenberg (WH) sets. This approach is interesting in its own right as it yields a mathematically tractable way of dealing with the mutual information between certain continuous-time random signals.Comment: final versio