Time-Energy Measure for Quantum Processes

Abstract

Quantum mechanics sets limits on how fast quantum processes can run given some system energy through time-energy uncertainty relations, and they imply that time and energy are tradeoff against each other. Thus, we propose to measure the time-energy as a single unit for quantum channels. We consider a time-energy measure for quantum channels and compute lower and upper bounds of it using the channel Kraus operators. For a special class of channels (which includes the depolarizing channel), we can obtain the exact value of the time-energy measure. One consequence of our result is that erasing quantum information requires $\sqrt{(n+1)/n}$ times more time-energy resource than erasing classical information, where $n$ is the system dimension.