Topics in quantum information and the theory of open quantum systems

This thesis examines seven topics in quantum information and the theory of open quantum systems. The first one concerns weak measurements and their universality as a means of generating quantum measurements. It is shown that every generalized measurement can be decomposed into a sequence of weak measurements which allows us to think of measurements as resulting form continuous stochastic processes. The second topic concerns an application of the decomposition into weak measurements to the theory of entanglement. Necessary and sufficient differential conditions for entanglement monotones are derived, and are used to find a new entanglement monotone for three-qubit states. The third topic examines the performance of different master equations for the description of non-Markovian dynamics. The system studied is a qubit coupled to a spin bath via the Ising interaction. The fourth topic studies continuous quantum error-correction in the case of non-Markovian decoherence. It is shown that due to the existence of a Zeno regime in non-Markovian dynamics, the performance of continuous quantum error correction may exhibit a quadratic improvement if the time resolution of the error-correcting operations is sufficiently high. The fifth topic concerns conditions for correctability of subsystem codes in the case of continuous decoherence. The obtained conditions on the Lindbladian and the system-environment Hamiltonian can be thought of as generalizations of the previously known conditions for noiseless subsystems to the case where the subsystem is time-dependent. The sixth topic examines the robustness of quantum error-correcting codes against initialization errors. It is shown that operator codes are robust against imperfect initialization without the need for restriction of the standard error-correction conditions. For this purpose, a new measure of fidelity for encoded information is introduced and its properties are discussed. The last topic concerns holonomic quantum computation and stabilizer codes. A fault-tolerant scheme for holonomic computations is presented, demonstrating the scalability of the holonomic method. The scheme opens the possibility for combining the benefits of error correction with the inherent resilience of the holonomic approach.