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arXiv:1310.3698 · Physical Review A

Quantum theory realizes all joint measurability graphs

Chris Heunen, Tobias Fritz, Manuel L. Reyes

Published Mar 20, 2014• 19 citations
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Abstract

Joint measurability of sharp quantum observables is determined pairwise, and so can be captured in a graph. We prove the converse: any graph whose vertices represent sharp observables and whose edges represent joint measurability is realized by quantum theory. This leads us to show that it is not always possible to use Neumark dilation to turn unsharp observables into sharp ones with the same joint measurability relations.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.032121

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Joint measurability of sharp quantum observables is determined pairwise, and so can be captured in a graph. We prove the converse: any graph whose vertices represent sharp observables and whose edges represent joint measurability is realized by quantum theory. This leads us to show that it is not always possible to use Neumark dilation to turn unsharp observables into sharp ones with the same joint measurability relations.
Measurements in quantum theory exhibit incompatibility, i.e., they can fail to be jointly measurable.An intuitive way to represent the (in)compatibility relations among a set of measurements is via a hypergraph representing their joint measurability structure: its vertices represent measurements and its hyperedges represent (all and only) subsets of compatible measurements.Projective measurements in quantum theory realize (all and only) joint measurability structures that are graphs.On the other hand, general measurements represented by positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) can realize arbitrary joint measurability structures.Here we explore the scope of joint measurability structures realizable with qubit POVMs.We develop a technique that we term marginal surgery to obtain nontrivial joint measurability structures starting from a set of compatible measurements.We show explicit examples of marginal surgery on a special set of qubit POVMs to construct joint measurability structures such as N-cycle and N-Specker scenarios for any integer N 3.We also show the realizability of various joint measurability structures with N ∈ {4, 5, 6} vertices.In particular, we show that all possible joint measurability structures with N = 4 vertices are realizable.We conjecture that all joint measurability structures are realizable with qubit POVMs.This contrasts with the unbounded dimension required in R. Kunjwal et al. [Phys. Rev. A 89, 052126 (2014)].Our results also render this previous construction maximally efficient in terms of the required Hilbert space dimension.We also obtain a sufficient condition for the joint measurability of any set of binary qubit POVMs which powers many of our results and should be of independent interest.
The question of quantifying the sharpness (or unsharpness) of a quantum mechanical effect is investigated. Apart from sharpness, another property, bias, is found to be relevant for the joint measurability or coexistence of two effects. Measures of bias will be defined and examples given. Dedication The impossibility of measuring jointly certain pairs of observables is an intriguing non-classical feature of quantum theory that Pekka Lahti identified as a candidate for a rigorous formulation of the principle of complementarity. While he was investigating this fundamental no-go statement in the early 1980s, he learned from Peter Mittelstaedt that one of his students was aiming to prove the positive possibility of approximate joint measurements of complementary quantities such as position and momentum. Pekka joined our group as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, and together we found that a reconciliation between complementarity and (approximate) joint measurability is possible on the basis of the generalized representation of observables as positive operator measures (POMs). Since then we have pursued together our aspirations of understanding quantum mechanics and understanding Nature. I have benefited much from Pekka’s intellectual rigor and have been privileged ever since to enjoy his warm humanity. It is a great pleasure to present this paper to Pekka as a token of thanks and friendship on the occasion of his 60th birthday, with all good wishes for many happy recurrences and productive years to come. 1
refer to the joint measurement problem for noncommuting quantum observables: “One of the aspects of quantum theory which has attracted the most general attention, is the novelty of the logical notions which it presupposes. It asserts that even a complete mathematical description of a physical system S does not in general enable one to predict with certainty the result of an experiment on S, and that in particular one can never predict with certainty both the position and the momentum of S (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). It further asserts that most pairs of observations are incompatible, and cannot be made on S simultaneously (Principle of Non-commutativity of Observations).” The object of the present paper is to consider what approximate solution one may hope to find to the joint measurement problem. Our main conclusion, based on a rigorous notion of unsharp observable, is that one can reasonably expect to find approximate joint measurements for any pair of noncommuting sharp observables, provided a trade-off in the sense of a Heisenberg uncertainty relation for measurement inaccuracies is taken into account. In addition, it will be seen that as a consequence of the noncom-mutativity of the given observables, the approximating observables must have degrees of unsharpness that obey yet another trade-off relation in the spirit of Heisenberg’s principle. These connections will be
For sharp quantum observables the following facts hold: (i) if we have a collection of sharp observables and each pair of them is jointly measurable, then they are jointly measurable all together; (ii) if two sharp observables are jointly measurable, then their joint observable is unique and it gives the greatest lower bound for the effects corresponding to the observables; (iii) if we have two sharp observables and their every possible two outcome partitionings are jointly measurable, then the observables themselves are jointly measurable. We show that, in general, these properties do not hold. Also some possible candidates which would accompany joint measurability and generalize these apparently useful properties are discussed.
We study the compatibility (or joint measurability) of quantum observables in a setting where the experimenter has access to multiple copies of a given quantum system, rather than performing the experiments on each individual copy separately. We introduce the index of incompatibility as a quantifier of incompatibility in this multi-copy setting, as well as the notion of the compatibility stack representing various compatibility relations present in a given set of observables. We then prove a general structure theorem for multi-copy joint observables and use it to prove that all abstract compatibility stacks with three vertices have realizations in terms of quantum observables.