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arXiv:1511.07548 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

An invitation to quantum incompatibility

Teiko Heinosaari, Takayuki Miyadera, Mário Ziman

Published Feb 15, 2016• 223 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract In the context of a physical theory, two devices, A and B , described by the theory are called incompatible if the theory does not allow the existence of a third device C that would have both A and B as its components. Incompatibility is a fascinating aspect of physical theories, especially in the case of quantum theory. The concept of incompatibility gives a common ground for several famous impossibility statements within quantum theory, such as ‘no-cloning’ and ‘no information without disturbance’; these can be all seen as statements about incompatibility of certain devices. The purpose of this paper is to give a concise overview of some of the central aspects of incompatibility.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8113/49/12/123001

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Abstract In the context of a physical theory, two devices, A and B , described by the theory are called incompatible if the theory does not allow the existence of a third device C that would have both A and B as its components. Incompatibility is a fascinating aspect of physical theories, especially in the case of quantum theory. The concept of incompatibility gives a common ground for several famous impossibility statements within quantum theory, such as ‘no-cloning’ and ‘no information without disturbance’; these can be all seen as statements about incompatibility of certain devices. The purpose of this paper is to give a concise overview of some of the central aspects of incompatibility.
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.
Abstract Two quantum channels are called compatible if they can be obtained as marginals from a single broadcasting channel; otherwise they are incompatible. We derive a characterization of the compatibility relation in terms of concatenation and conjugation, and we show that all pairs of sufficiently noisy quantum channels are compatible. The complement relation of incompatibility can be seen as a unifying aspect for several important quantum features, such as impossibility of universal broadcasting and unavoidable measurement disturbance. We show that the concepts of entanglement breaking channel and antidegradable channel can be completely characterized in terms compatibility.
This thesis concerns how attempting to measure certain fundamental properties of a physical theory can lead us to new insights. The idea of general probabilistic models is introduced and developed, in order to provide a way to be able to consider and compare different theories. A measure of incompatibility of two observables is defined, through the amount of smearing needed to make them jointly measureable. This measure is then used to characterise the degree of incompatibility that exists in a given theory. Quantum theory is then shown to be as incompatible as any other theory, but only in a very course grained sense. A related way of measuring the strength of incompatibility of a pair of observables is then shown to put a bound on a measure of the strength of non-local correlations. The notion of steering, or remote ensemble preparation, is then shown to be a sufficient condition for the saturation of that bound. Examples are considered that demonstrate that the given sufficient notion of steering is not necessary, and it is proposed how the measures can be modified in cases where the link does not hold. The idea of formulating measures of error and disturbance associated with a measurement device is discussed. The notion of a direct test of error or disturbance is used to analyse current proposed measures, and show their shortcomings.