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.
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.
Measurements in quantum theory can fail to be jointly measurable. Like entanglement, this incompatibility of measurements is necessary but not sufficient for violating Bell inequalities. The (in)compatibility relations among a set of measurements can be represented by a joint measurability structure, i.e., a hypergraph whose vertices denote measurements and hyperedges denote all and only compatible sets of measurements. Since incompatibility is necessary for a Bell violation, the joint measurability structure on each wing of a Bell experiment must necessarily be non-trivial, i.e., it must admit a subset of incompatible vertices. Here we show that for any non-trivial joint measurability structure with a finite set of vertices, there exists a quantum realization with a set of measurements that enables a Bell violation, i.e., given that Alice has access to this incompatible set of measurements, there exists a set of measurements for Bob and an entangled state shared between them such that they can jointly violate a Bell inequality. Hence, a non-trivial joint measurability structure is not only necessary for a Bell violation, but also sufficient.
Measurement incompatibility is necessary but not sufficient for violation of a Bell inequality. The structure of (in)compatibility relations among a set of measurements can be represented by a joint measurability structure, i.e., a hypergraph with its vertices representing measurements and its hyperedges representing all (and only) compatible sets of measurements. We show that for any joint measurability structure that admits at least a pair of incompatible vertices (i.e., a non-trivial joint measurability structure), there exists a quantum realization with a set of measurements that enables a Bell violation. In other words, we identify, for any joint measurability structure, an incompatible set of measurements that is sufficient for a Bell violation.
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.
Abstract Measurement incompatibility is one of the cornerstones of quantum theory. This phenomenon appears in many forms, of which the concept of non-joint measurability has received considerable attention in the recent years. In order to characterise this non-classical phenomenon, various analytical and numerical methods have been developed. The analytical approaches have mostly concentrated on the qubit case, as well as to scenarios involving sets of measurements with symmetries, such as position and momentum or sets of mutually unbiased bases. The numerical methods can, in principle, decide any finite-dimensional and discrete joint measurability problem, but they naturally have practical limitations in terms of computational power. These methods exclusively start from a given set of measurements and ask whether the set possesses incompatibility. Here, we take a complementary approach by asking which measurements are compatible with a given measurement. It turns out, that this question can be answered in full generality through a minimal Naimark dilation of the given measurement: the set of interest is exactly those measurements that have a block-diagonal representation in such dilation. We demonstrate the use of the technique through various qubit examples, leading to an alternative characterisation of all compatible pairs of binary qubit measurements, which retrieves the celebrated Busch criterion. We further apply the technique to special examples of trinary and continuous qubit measurements.
We study when a noisy qubit channel renders all positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs) jointly measurable. For every unital qubit channel, we derive the exact incompatibility-breaking criterion and prove that projective measurements already determine the boundary for arbitrary POVMs. Through the steering--joint-measurability correspondence, this result gives the exact POVM-steering boundary for all two-qubit states with maximally mixed marginals, with the Werner states recovered as a special case. For nonunital qubit channels, we construct a generally asymmetric parent POVM and obtain an explicit sufficient incompatibility-breaking condition, which in turn yields a sufficient unsteerability criterion for arbitrary two-qubit states.
Measurement incompatibility--the impossibility of jointly measuring certain quantum observables--is a fundamental resource for quantum information processing. We develop a graph-theoretic framework for quantifying this resource for large families of binary measurements, including Pauli observables on multi-qubit systems and k-body Majorana observables on n-mode fermionic systems. To each set of observables we associate an anti-commutativity graph, whose vertices represent observables and whose edges indicate pairs that anti-commute. In this representation, the incompatibility robustness--the minimal amount of classical noise required to render the set jointly measurable--becomes a graph invariant. We derive general bounds on this invariant in terms of the Lovász number, clique number, and fractional chromatic number, and show that the Lovász number yields the correct asymptotic scaling for k-body Majorana observables. For line graphs L(G), which naturally arise in the characterisation of exactly solvable spin models, we obtain spectral bounds on the robustness expressed through the energy and skew-energy of the underlying graph G. These bounds become tight for highly symmetric graphs, leading to closed formulas for several graph families. Finally, we identify structural conditions under which the robustness is determined by a simple function of the graph's maximum degree and the number of vertices and edges, and show that such extremal cases occur only when combinatorial structures such as Hadamard, conference or weighing matrices exist.