Weighted Bures Length Uncovers Quantum State Sensitivity

Abstract

The unitarity of quantum evolutions implies that the overlap between two initial states does not change in time. This property is commonly believed to explain the lack of state sensitivity in quantum theory, a feature that is prevailing in classical chaotic systems. However, a distance between two points in classical phase space is a completely different mathematical concept than an overlap distance between two points in Hilbert space. There is a possibility that state sensitivity in quantum theory can be uncovered with a help of some other metric. Here we show that the recently introduced Weighted Bures Length (WBL) achieves this task. In particular, we numerically study a cellular automaton-like unitary evolution of N qubits, known as Rule 54, and apply WBL to show that a single-qubit perturbation of a random initial state: (a) grows linearly in time under the nearest neighbour interaction on a cycle, (b) appears to grow exponentially in time under interaction given by a random bipartite graph.