Negative quasiprobability trajectories for Bell-diagonal states under local decoherence
Phys. Rev. E 114, 054108 – Published 5 November, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6vfn-b8kn
Abstract
The fluctuation theorem (FT) relates microscopic trajectory distributions to macroscopic averages. Using quasiprobability trajectories, this framework has recently been extended to quantum information dynamics. Despite sharing the form of conventional thermodynamic FTs, information FTs involve quasiprobabilities whose negativity and statistical properties remain poorly understood. In this work, we analytically determine the properties of negative distributions for two-qubit Bell-diagonal states evolving under local dephasing, depolarizing, and amplitude-damping channels, under the fixed local computational basis. We show that the occurrence of negative quasiprobabilities is not determined by the entanglement or Bell nonlocality of the initial state. For these channels, a diagonal-interference decomposition identifies a nonnegative reference contribution and yields channel-dependent interference bounds. More importantly, we prove that quasiprobability distributions containing negative weights can violate Horváth's necessary and sufficient criterion for the Jensen-Steffensen inequality to hold for every continuous convex function, even though the specific exponential Jensen-like relation enforced by the FT and the quantum data-processing inequality remains valid. This trajectory-level contrast with classical stochastic descriptions reveals a distinctive feature of quantum information dynamics that is invisible when only the corresponding average-level information inequalities are considered.