Connections and Metrics Respecting Standard Purification

Abstract

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.