Reducibility Theory and Ergodic Theorems for Ergodic Quantum Processes

Abstract

We develop a Perron-Frobenius type theory for products of random quantum channels acting on finite-dimensional matrix algebras sampled from a stationary and ergodic stochastic process, which, in keeping with the literature, we call ergodic quantum processes. This serves as a unifying framework for many models, including i.i.d., Markovian, periodic, and quasiperiodic models. We establish various characterizations of irreducibility, from which we recover a number of general ergodic theorems. We then analyze some specific examples, and, in particular, give a refinement of our theory in the i.i.d. case.