Weighted Bures length uncovers quantum state sensitivity.

Abstract

The unitarity of quantum evolutions implies that an overlap between two initial states does not change in time. This property is commonly believed to explain the apparent lack of state sensitivity in quantum theory, a feature that is prevailing in classical chaotic systems. However, classical state sensitivity is based on a distance between two trajectories in phase space which is a completely different mathematical concept than an overlap between two vectors in Hilbert space. It is possible that state sensitivity in quantum theory can be detected with the help of some special metric. Here we show that the recently introduced Weighted Bures length achieves this task. We numerically investigate a unitary cellular automaton of N interacting qubits and analyze how a single-qubit perturbation affects the evolution of WBL between the unperturbed and perturbed states. We observe a linear growth of WBL if the qubits are arranged into a cyclic graph and an exponential growth if they are arranged into a random bipartite graph.