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arXiv:1301.4762 · Physical Review A

Operational measure of incompatibility of noncommuting observables

Somshubhro Bandyopadhyay, Prabha Mandayam

Published Apr 29, 2013• 5 citations
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Abstract

Uncertainty relations are often considered to be a measure of incompatibility of noncommuting observables. However, such a consideration is not valid in general, motivating the need for an alternate measure that applies to any set of noncommuting observables. We present an operational approach to quantifying incompatibility without invoking uncertainty relations. Our measure aims to capture the incompatibility of noncommuting observables as manifest in the nonorthogonality of their eigenstates. We prove that this measure has all the desired properties: It is zero when the observables commute, strictly greater than zero when they do not, and is maximum when they are mutually unbiased. We also obtain tight upper bounds on this measure for any $N$ noncommuting observables and compute it exactly when the observables are mutually unbiased.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.87.042120

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Uncertainty relations are often considered to be a measure of incompatibility of noncommuting observables. However, such a consideration is not valid in general, motivating the need for an alternate measure that applies to any set of noncommuting observables. We present an operational approach to quantifying incompatibility without invoking uncertainty relations. Our measure aims to capture the incompatibility of noncommuting observables as manifest in the nonorthogonality of their eigenstates. We prove that this measure has all the desired properties: It is zero when the observables commute, strictly greater than zero when they do not, and is maximum when they are mutually unbiased. We also obtain tight upper bounds on this measure for any NNN noncommuting observables and compute it exactly when the observables are mutually unbiased.
We study two operational approaches to quantifying incompatibility that depart significantly from the well known entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) formalism. Both approaches result in incompatibility measures that yield non-zero values even when the pair of incompatible observables commute over a subspace, unlike EURs which give a zero lower bound in such cases. Here, we explicitly show how these measures go beyond EURs in quantifying incompatibility: For any set of quantum observables, we show that both incompatibility measures are bounded from below by the corresponding EURs for the Tsallis (T2T_{2}T2​) entropy. We explicitly evaluate the incompatibility of a pair of qubit observables in both operational scenarios. We also obtain an efficiently computable lower bound for the mutually incompatibility of a general set of observables.
We discuss a recently proposed class of incompatibility measures for quantum measurements, which is based on quantifying the effect of measurements of one observable on the statistics of the outcome of another. We summarize the properties of this class of measures, and present a tight upper bound for the incompatibility of any set of projective measurements in finite dimensions. We also discuss non-projective measurements, and give a non-trivial upper bound on the mutual incompatibility of a pair of Luders instruments. Using the example of incompatible observables that commute on a subspace, we elucidate how this class of measures goes beyond uncertainty relations in quantifying the mutual incompatibility of quantum measurements.
We propose a class of incompatibility measures for quantum observables based on quantifying the effect of a measurement of one observable on the statistics of the outcomes of another. Specifically, for a pair of observables AAA and BBB with purely discrete spectra, we compare the following two probability distributions: one resulting from a measurement of AAA followed by a measurement of BBB on a given state and the other obtained from a measurement of BBB alone on the same state. We show that maximizing the distance between these two distributions over all states yields a valid measure of the incompatibility of observables AAA and BBB, which is zero if and only if they commute and is strictly greater than zero (and less than or equal to one) otherwise. For finite-dimensional systems, we obtain a tight upper bound on the incompatibility of any pair of observables and show that the bound is attained when the observables are totally nondegenerate and associated with mutually unbiased bases. In the process, we also establish an important relation between the incompatibility of a pair of observables and the maximal disturbances due to their measurements. Finally, we indicate how these measures of incompatibility and disturbance can be extended to the more general class of nonprojective measurements. In particular, we obtain a nontrivial upper bound on the incompatibility of one L\"uders instrument with another.
Pivotal within quantum physics, the concept of quantum incompatibility is generally related to algebraic aspects of the formalism, such as commutation relations and unbiasedness of bases. Recently, the concept was identified as a resource in tasks involving quantum state discrimination and quantum programmability. Here, we link quantum incompatibility with the amount of information that can be extracted from a system upon successive measurements of noncommuting observables, a scenario related to communication tasks. This approach leads us to characterize incompatibility as a resource encoded in a physical context, which involves both the quantum state and observables. Moreover, starting with a measure of context incompatibility we derive a measurement-incompatibility quantifier that is easily computable, admits a geometrical interpretation, and is maximum only if the eigenbases of the involved observables are mutually unbiased.
For a pair of observables, they are called ``incompatible'' if and only if their commutator does not vanish, which represents one of the key features in quantum mechanics. The question is, how can we characterize the incompatibility among three or more observables? Here, we explore one possible route towards this goal through uncertainty relations, which impose fundamental constraints on the measurement precisions for incompatible observables. Specifically, we propose to measure the incompatibility by the optimal state-independent bounds of additive variance-based uncertainty relations. In this way, the degree of incompatibility becomes an intrinsic property among the operators, i.e., state independent. In particular, we focus on the incompatibility of spin-1/21/21/2 systems as an illustration. For an arbitrary, including nonorthogonal, setting of a finite number Pauli-spin operators, the incompatibility is analytically solved; the spins are maximally incompatible if and only if they are orthogonal to each other. On the other hand, our measure of incompatibility represents a versatile tool for applications such as testing the entanglement of bipartite states, and EPR-steering criteria.
The uncertainty relation, as one of the fundamental principles of quantum physics, captures the incompatibility of noncommuting observables in the preparation of quantum states. In this work, we derive two strong and universal uncertainty relations for N(N ≥ 2) observables with discrete and bounded spectra, one in multiplicative form and the other in additive form. To verify their validity, for illustration, we implement in the spin-1/2 system an experiment with single-photon measurement. The experimental results exhibit the validity and robustness of these uncertainty relations, and indicate the existence of stringent lower bounds.