dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaDistance-based degrees of polarization for a quantum field
| Authors | A. B. Klimov, L. L. Sanchez-Soto, E. C. Yustas, J. Soderholm, G. Bjork |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | quant-ph/0504226 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0504226 |
| DOI | 10.1103/PhysRevA.72.033813 |
| Journal | Phys.Rev. A72 (2005) 033813 |
Abstract
It is well established that unpolarized light is invariant with respect to any SU(2) polarization transformation. This requirement fully characterizes the set of density matrices representing unpolarized states. We introduce the degree of polarization of a quantum state as its distance to the set of unpolarized states. We use two different candidates of distance, namely the Hilbert-Schmidt and the Bures metric, showing that they induce fundamentally different degrees of polarization. We apply these notions to relevant field states and we demonstrate that they avoid some of the problems arising with the classical definition.
{
"annotation_id": "79b2e04d-a3fb-4aa7-86d1-9119591907e1",
"date_created": "2026-03-02T18:02:17.221000Z",
"date_modified": "2026-03-02T18:02:17.221000Z",
"file_hash": "df79e6c4e3254e6f1c429a68e12a8378df82679bddec58df3d9d1b17d109be13",
"private": false,
"record": {
"abstract": "It is well established that unpolarized light is invariant with respect to\nany SU(2) polarization transformation. This requirement fully characterizes the\nset of density matrices representing unpolarized states. We introduce the\ndegree of polarization of a quantum state as its distance to the set of\nunpolarized states. We use two different candidates of distance, namely the\nHilbert-Schmidt and the Bures metric, showing that they induce fundamentally\ndifferent degrees of polarization. We apply these notions to relevant field\nstates and we demonstrate that they avoid some of the problems arising with the\nclassical definition.",
"arxiv_id": "quant-ph/0504226",
"authors": [
"A. B. Klimov",
"L. L. Sanchez-Soto",
"E. C. Yustas",
"J. Soderholm",
"G. Bjork"
],
"categories": [
"quant-ph"
],
"doi": "10.1103/PhysRevA.72.033813",
"journal_ref": "Phys.Rev. A72 (2005) 033813",
"title": "Distance-based degrees of polarization for a quantum field",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0504226"
},
"schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
"source": {
"execution_id": "d779bdcc-00cd-4a78-8360-7d66b6ea1714",
"id": "arXiv Dataset IDs",
"type": "Model",
"variant": "snapshot-2026-03-01",
"version": "0.1.0"
},
"user_id": 1000002
}