Observable-Geometric Phases and Quantum Computation

This paper presents an alternative approach to geometric phases from the observable point of view. Precisely, we introduce the notion of observable-geometric phases, which is defined as a sequence of phases associated with a complete set of eigenstates of the observable. The observable-geometric phases are shown to be connected with the quantum geometry of the observable space evolving according to the Heisenberg equation. They are indeed distinct from Berry’s phase (Berry Proc. R. Soc. London Series A 392:45–57, 1984; Simon Phys. Rev. Lett. 51:2167–2170, 1983) as the system evolves adiabatically. It is shown that the observable-geometric phases can be used to realize a universal set of quantum gates in quantum computation. This scheme leads to the same gates as the Abelian geometric gates of Zhu and Wang (Phys. Rev. Lett. 89: 097902: 1–4, 2002, Phys. Rev. A 67: 022319: 1–9, 2003), but based on the quantum geometry of the observable space beyond the state space.