Connections and Metrics Respecting Standard Purification

Standard purification interlaces Hermitian and Riemannian metrics on the space of density operators with metrics and connections on the purifying Hilbert-Schmidt space. We discuss connections and metrics which are well adopted to purification, and present a selected set of relations between them. A connection, as well as a metric on state space, can be obtained from a metric on the purification space. We include a condition, with which this correspondence becomes one-to-one. Our methods are borrowed from elementary *-representation and fibre space theory. We lift, as an example, solutions of a von Neumann equation, write down holonomy invariants for cyclic ones, and ``add noise'' to a curve of pure states.Comment: Latex, 27 page

Transition probabilities between quasifree states

We obtain a general formula for the transition probabilities between any state of the algebra of the canonical commutation relations (CCR-algebra) and a squeezed quasifree state. Applications of this formula are made for the case of multimode thermal squeezed states of quantum optics using a general canonical decomposition of the correlation matrix valid for any quasifree state. In the particular case of a one mode CCR-algebra we show that the transition probability between two quasifree squeezed states is a decreasing function of the geodesic distance between the points of the upper half plane representing these states. In the special case of the purification map it is shown that the transition probability between the state of the enlarged system and the product state of real and fictitious subsystems can be a measure for the entanglement.Comment: 13 pages, REVTeX, no figure

Off-diagonal geometric phase for mixed states

We extend the off-diagonal geometric phase [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 85}, 3067 (2000)] to mixed quantal states. The nodal structure of this phase in the qubit (two-level) case is compared with that of the diagonal mixed state geometric phase [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 85}, 2845 (2000)]. Extension to higher dimensional Hilbert spaces is delineated. A physical scenario for the off-diagonal mixed state geometric phase in polarization-entangled two-photon interferometry is proposed.Comment: small corrections; journal reference adde