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arXiv:1504.04200 · Physical Review Letters

Experimental Test of Entropic Noise-Disturbance Uncertainty Relations for Spin- 1/2 Measurements

Georg Sulyok, Stephan Sponar, Bülent Demirel, Francesco Buscemi, Michael J. W. Hall, Masanao Ozawa, Yuji Hasegawa

Published Jul 13, 2015• 49 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Information-theoretic definitions for noise and disturbance in quantum measurements were given in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 050401 (2014)] and a state-independent noise-disturbance uncertainty relation was obtained. Here, we derive a tight noise-disturbance uncertainty relation for complementary qubit observables and carry out an experimental test. Successive projective measurements on the neutron's spin-1/2 system, together with a correction procedure which reduces the disturbance, are performed. Our experimental results saturate the tight noise-disturbance uncertainty relation for qubits when an optimal correction procedure is applied.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.115.030401

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Information-theoretic definitions for noise and disturbance in quantum measurements were given in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 050401 (2014)] and a state-independent noise-disturbance uncertainty relation was obtained. Here, we derive a tight noise-disturbance uncertainty relation for complementary qubit observables and carry out an experimental test. Successive projective measurements on the neutron's spin-1/2 system, together with a correction procedure which reduces the disturbance, are performed. Our experimental results saturate the tight noise-disturbance uncertainty relation for qubits when an optimal correction procedure is applied.
Information-theoretic uncertainty relations formulate the joint immeasurability of two noncommuting observables in terms of information entropies.The tradeoff of the accuracy in the outcome of two successive measurements manifests in entropic noise-disturbance uncertainty relations.Recent theoretical analysis predicts that projective measurements are not optimal, with respect to the noise-disturbance tradeoffs.Therefore, the results in our previous paper [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 030401 (2015)] are outperformed by general quantum measurements.Here, we experimentally test a tight information-theoretic measurement uncertainty relation for three-outcome positive-operator-valued measures, using neutron spin-1 2 qubits.The obtained results violate the lower bound for projective measurements as theoretically predicted.
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The uncertainty principle is an important tenet and active field of research in quantum physics. Information-theoretic uncertainty relations, formulated using entropies, provide one approach to quantifying the extent to which two non-commuting observables can be jointly measured. Recent theoretical analysis predicts that general quantum measurements are necessary to saturate some such uncertainty relations and thereby overcome certain limitations of projective measurements. Here, we experimentally test a tight information-theoretic measurement uncertainty relation with neutron spin- 1 / 2 qubits. The noise associated to the measurement of an observable is defined via conditional Shannon entropies and a tradeoff relation between the noises for two arbitrary spin observables is demonstrated. The optimal bound of this tradeoff is experimentally obtained for various non-commuting spin observables. For some of these observables this lower bound can be reached with projective measurements, but we observe that, in other cases, the tradeoff is only saturated by general quantum measurements (i.e. positive-operator valued measures) as predicted theoretically. These results showcase experimentally the advantage obtainable by general quantum measurements over projective measurements when probing certain uncertainty relations.
The emergence of the uncertainty principle has celebrated its 90th anniversary recently. For this occasion, the latest experimental results of uncertainty relations quantified in terms of Shannon entropies are presented, concentrating only on outcomes in neutron optics. The focus is on the type of measurement uncertainties that describe the inability to obtain the respective individual results from joint measurement statistics. For this purpose, the neutron spin of two non-commuting directions is analyzed. Two sub-categories of measurement uncertainty relations are considered: noise–noise and noise–disturbance uncertainty relations. In the first case, it will be shown that the lowest boundary can be obtained and the uncertainty relations be saturated by implementing a simple positive operator-valued measure (POVM). For the second category, an analysis for projective measurements is made and error correction procedures are presented.
The indeterminacy inherent in quantum measurements is an outstanding character of quantum theory, which manifests itself typically in the uncertainty principle. In the last decade, several universally valid forms of error-disturbance uncertainty relations were derived for completely general quantum measurements for arbitrary states. Subsequently, Branciard established a form that is optimal for spin measurements for some pure states. However, the bound in his inequality is not stringent for mixed states. One of the present authors recently derived a new bound tight in the corresponding mixed state case. Here, a neutron-optical experiment is carried out to investigate this new relation: it is tested whether error and disturbance of quantum measurements disappear or persist in mixing up the measured ensemble. The attainability of the new bound is experimentally observed, falsifying the tightness of Branciard's bound for mixed spin states.
The well-known Robertson-Schr\"odinger uncertainty relations miss an irreducible lower bound. This is widely attributed to the lower bound's state dependence. Therefore, Abbott et al. introduced a general approach to derive tight state-independent uncertainty relations for qubit measurements [Mathematics 4, 8 (2016)]. The relations are expressed in two measures of uncertainty, which are standard deviation and entropy, both functions of the expectation value. Here, we present a neutron polarimetric test of the tight state-independent preparation uncertainty relations for orthogonal, as well as nonorthogonal, Pauli spin observables. The final results, obtained with pure and mixed spin states, reproduce the theoretical predictions clearly for arbitrary initial states of variable degree of polarization.