Abstract

There is a lower bound for the "speed" of quantum evolution as measured by the time needed to reach an orthogonal state. We show that, for two-qubits systems, states saturating the quantum speed limit tend to exhibit a small amount of local evolution, as measured by the fidelity between the initial and final single qubit states after the time τ required by the composite system to reach an orthogonal state. Consequently, a trade-off between the speed of global evolution and the amount of local evolution seems to be at work. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd.