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arXiv:1204.3188 · Journal of Mathematical Physics

Characterization of informational completeness for covariant phase space observables

Jukka Kiukas, PEKKA J. LAHTI, Jussi Schultz, Reinhard F. Werner

Published Sep 27, 2012• 30 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In the nonrelativistic setting with finitely many canonical degrees of freedom, a shift-covariant phase space observable is uniquely characterized by a positive operator of trace one and, in turn, by the Fourier-Weyl transform of this operator. We study three properties of such observables, and characterize them in terms of the zero set of this transform. The first is informational completeness, for which it is necessary and sufficient that the zero set has dense complement. The second is a version of informational completeness for the Hilbert-Schmidt class, equivalent to the zero set being of measure zero, and the third, known as regularity, is equivalent to the zero set being empty. We give examples demonstrating that all three conditions are distinct. The three conditions are the special cases for p = 1, 2, ∞ of a more general notion of p-regularity defined as the norm density of the span of translates of the operator in the Schatten-p class. We show that the relation between zero sets and p-regularity can be mapped completely to the corresponding relation for functions in classical harmonic analysis.

DOI
10.1063/1.4754278

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Abstract We discuss symmetric quantum measurements and the associated covariant observables modelled, respectively, as instruments and positive-operator-valued measures. The emphasis of this work are the optimality properties of the measurements, namely, extremality, informational completeness, and the rank-1 property which contrast the complementary class of (rank-1) projection-valued measures. The first half of this work concentrates solely on finite-outcome measurements symmetric w.r.t. finite groups where we derive exhaustive characterizations for the pointwise Kraus-operators of covariant instruments and necessary and sufficient extremality conditions using these Kraus-operators. We motivate the use of covariance methods by showing that observables covariant with respect to symmetric groups contain a family of representatives from both of the complementary optimality classes of observables and show that even a slight deviation from a rank-1 projection-valued measure can yield an extreme informationally complete rank-1 observable. The latter half of this work derives similar results for continuous measurements in (possibly) infinite dimensions. As an example we study covariant phase space instruments, their structure, and extremality properties.
We construct a family of bounded, finitely additive, covariant positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on the real line by applying generalised Banach-Cesaro asymptotic averaging to locally finite covariant POVMs. In contrast to the strictly shift-invariant case, where countably additive operator measures are restricted to scalar multiples of a single fixed operator, the introduced covariant setting allows for non-commuting averaged operator values while successfully normalising the total mass. We develop an integration theory for complex-valued functions by taking the completion of simple integrable functions with respect to the continuous operator norm induced by the positive integral of their absolute values. The integration spaces for the original and the averaged measures are shown to possess distinct null classes. Finally, we introduce the operator-valued Fourier transform on these integration spaces and analyze the core algebraic constraints imposed by the covariance property on the exponential multipliers.
Symmetric informationally complete (SIC) positive operator valued measures (POVMs) are a class of quantum measurements which, in addition to being informationally complete, satisfy three conditions: (1) every POVM element is rank one, (2) the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product between any two distinct elements is constant, and (3) the trace of each element is constant. The third condition is often overlooked, since it may give the impression that it follows trivially from the second. We show that this condition cannot be removed, as it leads to two distinct values for the trace of an element of the POVM. This observation has led us to define a broader class of measurements which we call semi-SIC POVMs. In dimension two, we show that semi-SIC POVMs exist, and we construct the entire family. In higher dimensions, we characterize key properties and applications of semi-SIC POVMs, and note that the proof of their existence remains open.