Decomposition of quantum Markov chains and its applications.

Markov chains have been widely employed as a fundamental model in the studies of probabilistic and stochastic communicating and concurrent systems. It is well-understood that decomposition techniques play a key role in reachability analysis and model-checking of Markov chains. (Discrete-time) quantum Markov chains have been introduced as a model of quantum communicating systems [1] and also a semantic model of quantum programs [2] . The BSCC (Bottom Strongly Connected Component) and stationary coherence decompositions of quantum Markov chains were introduced in [3–5] . This paper presents a new decomposition technique, namely periodic decomposition, for quantum Markov chains. We further establish a limit theorem for them. As an application, an algorithm to find a maximum dimensional noiseless subsystem of a quantum communicating system is given using decomposition techniques of quantum Markov chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]