Recent years have witnessed a controversy over Heisenberg's famous error-disturbance relation. Here the conflict is resolved by way of an analysis of the possible conceptualizations of measurement error and disturbance in quantum mechanics. Two approaches to adapting the classic notion of root-mean-square error to quantum measurements are discussed. One is based on the concept of a noise operator; its natural operational content is that of a mean deviation of the values of two observables measured jointly, and thus its applicability is limited to cases where such joint measurements are available. The second error measure quantifies the differences between two probability distributions obtained in separate runs of measurements and is of unrestricted applicability. We show that there are no nontrivial unconditional joint-measurement bounds for state-dependent errors in the conceptual framework discussed here, while Heisenberg-type measurement uncertainty relations for state-independent errors have been proven.
Recent years have witnessed a controversy over Heisenberg's famous error-disturbance relation. Here the conflict is resolved by way of an analysis of the possible conceptualizations of measurement error and disturbance in quantum mechanics. Two approaches to adapting the classic notion of root-mean-square error to quantum measurements are discussed. One is based on the concept of a noise operator; its natural operational content is that of a mean deviation of the values of two observables measured jointly, and thus its applicability is limited to cases where such joint measurements are available. The second error measure quantifies the differences between two probability distributions obtained in separate runs of measurements and is of unrestricted applicability. We show that there are no nontrivial unconditional joint-measurement bounds for state-dependent errors in the conceptual framework discussed here, while Heisenberg-type measurement uncertainty relations for state-independent errors have been proven.
Reports on experiments recently performed in Vienna [Erhard et al, Nature Phys. 8, 185 (2012)] and Toronto [Rozema et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 100404 (2012)] include claims of a violation of Heisenberg’s error-disturbance relation. In contrast, a Heisenberg-type tradeoff relation for joint measurements of position and momentum has been formulated and proven in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 160405 (2013)]. Here I show how the apparent conflict is resolved by a careful consideration of the quantum generalization of the notion of root-mean-square error. The claim of a violation of Heisenberg’s principle is untenable as it is based on a historically wrong attribution of an incorrect relation to Heisenberg, which is in fact trivially violated. We review a new general trade-off relation for the necessary errors in approximate joint measurements of incompatible qubit observables that is in the spirit of Heisenberg’s intuitions. The experiments mentioned may directly be used to test this new error inequality.
Abstract Defining and measuring the error of a measurement is one of the most fundamental activities in experimental science. However, quantum theory shows a peculiar difficulty in extending the classical notion of root-mean-square (rms) error to quantum measurements. A straightforward generalization based on the noise-operator was used to reformulate Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation on the accuracy of simultaneous measurements to be universally valid and made the conventional formulation testable to observe its violation. Recently, its reliability was examined based on an anomaly that the error vanishes for some inaccurate measurements, in which the meter does not commute with the measured observable. Here, we propose an improved definition for a quantum generalization of the classical rms error, which is state-dependent, operationally definable, and perfectly characterizes accurate measurements. Moreover, it is shown that the new notion maintains the previously obtained universally valid uncertainty relations and their experimental confirmations without changing their forms and interpretations, in contrast to a prevailing view that a state-dependent formulation for measurement uncertainty relation is not tenable.
The quantification of the ``measurement uncertainty''aspect of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle---that is, the study of trade-offs between accuracy and disturbance, or between accuracies in an approximate joint measurement on two incompatible observables---has regained a lot of interest recently. Several approaches have been proposed and debated. In this paper we consider Ozawa's definitions for inaccuracies (as root-mean-square errors) in approximate joint measurements, and study how these are constrained in different cases, whether one specifies certain properties of the approximations---namely their standard deviations and/or their bias---or not. Extending our previous work [C. Branciard, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 110, 6742 (2013)], we derive error-trade-off relations, which we prove to be tight for pure states. We show explicitly how all previously known relations for Ozawa's inaccuracies follow from ours. While our relations are in general not tight for mixed states, we show how these can be strengthened and how tight relations can still be obtained in that case.
Reports on experiments recently performed in Vienna [Erhard et al., Nature Phys. 8, 185 (2012)] and Toronto [Rozema et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 100404 (2012)] include claims of a violation of Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation. In contrast, we have presented and proven a Heisenberg-type relation for joint measurements of position and momentum [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 160405 (2013)]. To resolve the apparent conflict, we formulate here a general trade-off relation for errors in qubit measurements, using the same concepts as we did in the position-momentum case. We show that the combined errors in an approximate joint measurement of a pair of $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1$-valued observables A,B are tightly bounded from below by a quantity that measures the degree of incompatibility of A and B. The claim of a violation of Heisenberg is shown to fail because it is based on unsuitable measures of error and disturbance. Finally we show how the experiments mentioned may directly be used to test our error inequality.
The notions of error and disturbance appearing in quantum uncertainty relations are often quantified by the discrepancy of a physical quantity from its ideal value. However, these real and ideal values are not the outcomes of simultaneous measurements, and comparing the values of unmeasured observables is not necessarily meaningful according to quantum theory. To overcome these conceptual difficulties, we take a different approach and define error and disturbance in an operational manner. In particular, we formulate both in terms of the probability that one can successfully distinguish the actual measurement device from the relevant hypothetical ideal by any experimental test whatsoever. This definition itself does not rely on the formalism of quantum theory, avoiding many of the conceptual difficulties of usual definitions. We then derive new Heisenberg-type uncertainty relations for both joint measurability and the error-disturbance tradeoff for arbitrary observables of finite-dimensional systems, as well as for the case of position and momentum. Our relations may be directly applied in information processing settings, for example to infer that devices which can faithfully transmit information regarding one observable do not leak any information about conjugate observables to the environment. We also show that Englert's wave-particle duality relation [PRL 77, 2154 (1996)] can be viewed as an error-disturbance uncertainty relation.
The notions of error and disturbance appearing in quantum uncertainty relations are often quantified by the discrepancy of a physical quantity from its ideal value. However, these real and ideal values are not the outcomes of simultaneous measurements, and comparing the values of unmeasured observables is not necessarily meaningful according to quantum theory. To overcome these conceptual difficulties, we take a different approach and define error and disturbance in an operational manner. In particular, we formulate both in terms of the probability that one can successfully distinguish the actual measurement device from the relevant hypothetical ideal by any experimental test whatsoever. This definition itself does not rely on the formalism of quantum theory, avoiding many of the conceptual difficulties of usual definitions. We then derive new Heisenberg-type uncertainty relations for both joint measurability and the error-disturbance tradeoff for arbitrary observables of finite-dimensional systems, as well as for the case of position and momentum. Our relations may be directly applied in information processing settings, for example to infer that devices which can faithfully transmit information regarding one observable do not leak any information about conjugate observables to the environment. We also show that Englert's wave-particle duality relation [PRL 77, 2154 (1996)] can be viewed as an error-disturbance uncertainty relation.