Operationally invariant measure of the distance between quantum states by complementary measurements

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 Aug 22;91(8):087902. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.087902. Epub 2003 Aug 20.

Abstract

We propose an operational measure of distance of two quantum states, which conversely tells us their closeness. This is defined as a sum of differences in partial knowledge over a complete set of mutually complementary measurements for the two states. It is shown that the measure is operationally invariant and it is equivalent to the Hilbert-Schmidt distance. The operational measure of distance provides a remarkable interpretation of the information distance between quantum states.