Quantum Monge-Kantorovich problem and transport distance between density matrices

Abstract: A quantum version of the Monge--Kantorovich optimal transport problem is analyzed. The transport cost is minimized over the set of all bipartite coupling states $\rho^{AB}$, such that both of its reduced density matrices $\rho^A$ and $\rho^B$ of dimension $N$ are fixed. We show that, selecting the quantum cost matrix to be proportional to the projector on the antisymmetric subspace, the minimal transport cost leads to a semidistance between $\rho^A$ and $\rho^B$, which is bounded from below by the rescaled Bures distance and from above by the root infidelity. In the single qubit case we provide a semi-analytic expression for the optimal transport cost between any two states and prove that its square root satisfies the triangle inequality and yields an analogue of the Wasserstein distance of order two on the set of density matrices. We introduce an associated measure of proximity of quantum states, called SWAP-fidelity, and discuss its properties and applications in quantum machine learning.