Tight Upper Bound Of The Maximum Speed Of Evolution Of A Quantum State

H. F. Chau

Published 2010-03-03, updated 2010-06-15Version 2

I report a tight upper bound of the maximum speed of evolution from one quantum state $\rho$ to another $\rho'$ with fidelity $F(\rho,\rho')$ less than or equal to an arbitrary but fixed value under the action of a time-independent Hamiltonian. Since the bound is directly proportional to the average absolute deviation from the median of the energy of the state ${\mathscr D}E$, one may interpret ${\mathscr D}E$ as a meaningful measure of the maximum information processing capability of a system.