Reverse quantum state diffusion from differential geometry

Abstract: Quantum state diffusion unravels a Lindblad master equation into stochastic trajectories of pure states. The ensemble of trajectories is described by a probability density on the manifold of pure states, which contains much more information than the density matrix, its first moment. We derive the time reversal of this diffusion. Writing the reversal of a general diffusion on a manifold in Stratonovich form, and passing through the manifold of pure states, we obtain a backward stochastic differential equation for the state vector, valid for any Hilbert space dimension and any Lindbladian. The backward stochastic equation provides a physical, nonlinear unravelling of the inverse Lindbladian that holds only for the ensemble from which it was constructed. Following score-based generative models, we then use the backward equation to generate a new ensemble close to the original. For the depolarizing channel the unravelling is a Brownian motion on complex projective space, so the uniform distribution of pure states is its stationary law in any dimension. Starting the backward equation from that prior, we bound the error of the resulting distribution compared to the original one in different settings: exact and learned scores, continuous and discrete time.