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arXiv:1402.5722 · Physical Review A

Entropic uncertainty from effective anticommutators

Jędrzej Kaniewski, Marco Tomamichel, Stephanie Wehner

Published Jul 22, 2014• 56 citations
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Abstract

We investigate entropic uncertainty relations for two or more binary measurements, for example, spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ or polarization measurements. We argue that the effective anticommutators of these measurements, i.e., the anticommutators evaluated on the state prior to measuring, are an expedient measure of measurement incompatibility. Based on the knowledge of pairwise effective anticommutators we derive a class of entropic uncertainty relations in terms of conditional R\'enyi entropies. Our uncertainty relations are formulated in terms of effective measures of incompatibility, which can be certified in a device-independent fashion. Consequently, we discuss potential applications of our findings to device-independent quantum cryptography. Moreover, to investigate the tightness of our analysis we consider the simplest (and very well studied) scenario of two measurements on a qubit. We find that our results outperform the celebrated bound due to Maassen and Uffink [Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 1103 (1988)] and provide an analytical expression for the minimum uncertainty which also outperforms some recent bounds based on majorization.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.90.012332

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We investigate entropic uncertainty relations for two or more binary measurements, for example, spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ or polarization measurements. We argue that the effective anticommutators of these measurements, i.e., the anticommutators evaluated on the state prior to measuring, are an expedient measure of measurement incompatibility. Based on the knowledge of pairwise effective anticommutators we derive a class of entropic uncertainty relations in terms of conditional R'enyi entropies. Our uncertainty relations are formulated in terms of effective measures of incompatibility, which can be certified in a device-independent fashion. Consequently, we discuss potential applications of our findings to device-independent quantum cryptography. Moreover, to investigate the tightness of our analysis we consider the simplest (and very well studied) scenario of two measurements on a qubit. We find that our results outperform the celebrated bound due to Maassen and Uffink [Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 1103 (1988)] and provide an analytical expression for the minimum uncertainty which also outperforms some recent bounds based on majorization.
Entropic uncertainty relations express the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle by quantifying uncertainty in terms of entropy. Central questions include the derivation of lower bounds on the total uncertainty for given observables, the characterization of observables that allow strong uncertainty relations, and the construction of such relations for the case of several observables. We demonstrate how the stabilizer formalism can be applied to these questions. We show that the Maassen–Uffink entropic uncertainty relation is tight for the measurement in any pair of stabilizer bases. We compare the relative strengths of variance-based and various entropic uncertainty relations for dichotomic anticommuting observables.
Entropic Uncertainty relations are powerful tools, especially in quantum cryptography. They typically bound the amount of uncertainty a third-party adversary may hold on a measurement outcome as a result of the measurement overlap. However, when the two measurement bases are biased towards one another, standard entropic uncertainty relations do not always provide optimal lower bounds on the entropy. Here, we derive a new entropic uncertainty relation, for certain quantum states, which can provide a significantly higher bound even if the two measurement bases are no longer mutually unbiased. We evaluate our bound on two different quantum cryptographic protocols, including BB84 with faulty/biased measurement devices, and show that our new bound can produce substantially higher key-rates under several scenarios when compared with prior work using standard entropic uncertainty relations.
Entropic uncertainty relations place nontrivial lower bounds to the sum of Shannon information entropies for noncommuting observables. Here we obtain a lower bound on the entropy sum for general pairs of observables in finite-dimensional Hilbert space, which improves on the best bound known to date [H. Maassen and J. B. M. Uffink, Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 1103 (1988)] for a wide class of observables. This result follows from another formulation of the uncertainty principle, the Landau-Pollak inequality, whose relationship to the Maassen-Uffink entropic uncertainty relation is discussed.
Two of the most intriguing features of quantum physics are the uncertainty principle and the occurrence of nonlocal correlations. The uncertainty principle states that there exist pairs of incompatible measurements on quantum systems such that their outcomes cannot both be predicted. On the other hand, nonlocal correlations of measurement outcomes at different locations cannot be explained by classical physics, but appear in the presence of entanglement. Here, we show that these two fundamental quantum effects are quantitatively related. Namely, we provide an entropic uncertainty relation for the outcomes of two binary measurements, where the lower bound on the uncertainty is quantified in terms of the maximum Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt value that can be achieved with these measurements. We discuss applications of this uncertainty relation in quantum cryptography, in particular, to certify quantum sources using untrusted devices.
Entropic uncertainty relations H(A)+H(B)⩾γH(A)+H(B)\geqslant γH(A)+H(B)⩾γ give a nonzero lower bound γγγ to the sum of the Shannon entropies HHH of the outcome probabilities of incompatible observables AAA and BBB. They are better than the variance-based uncertainty relations because they only depend on the Born statistics of the outcomes and not on the outcomes themselves, and because bounds γγγ typically are state independent. Here we provide a state-independent lower bound γsγ_sγs​ that is better than the textbook Maassen-Uffink bound and, in the limit of the parameter s→2s\to 2s→2, becomes asymptotically tight for all A,BA,BA,B. The bound can be extended to Renyi entropies. After the submission of this paper, we found out that the main results presented here were already on page 6 of https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2018-03-30-59/pdf/
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.