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arXiv:2402.08060 · New Journal of Physics

Information gain and measurement disturbance for quantum agents

Arthur O. T. Pang, Noah Lupu-Gladstein, Y. Batuhan Yilmaz, C Pria Dobney, Rui Jie Tang, Aharon Brodutch, Aephraim M. Steinberg

Published Aug 25, 2026• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract The traditional formalism of quantum measurement (hereafter ‘TQM’) describes processes where some properties of quantum states are extracted and stored as classical information. While TQM is a natural and appropriate description of how humans interact with quantum systems, it is silent on the question of how a more general, quantum , agent would do so. How do we describe the observation of a system by an agent with the ability to store not only classical information but quantum states in its memory? In this paper, we extend the idea of measurement to a more general class of sensors for quantum agents which interact with a system in such a way that the agent’s memory stores information (classical or quantum) about the system under study. For appropriate sensory interactions, the quantum agent may ‘learn’ more about the system than would be possible under any set of classical measurements—but as we show, this comes at the cost of additional measurement disturbance. We experimentally demonstrate such a system and characterize the tradeoffs by considering the channel capacity required to erase the effect of a measurement.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/ae9e64

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Abstract The traditional formalism of quantum measurement (hereafter ‘TQM’) describes processes where some properties of quantum states are extracted and stored as classical information. While TQM is a natural and appropriate description of how humans interact with quantum systems, it is silent on the question of how a more general, quantum , agent would do so. How do we describe the observation of a system by an agent with the ability to store not only classical information but quantum states in its memory? In this paper, we extend the idea of measurement to a more general class of sensors for quantum agents which interact with a system in such a way that the agent’s memory stores information (classical or quantum) about the system under study. For appropriate sensory interactions, the quantum agent may ‘learn’ more about the system than would be possible under any set of classical measurements—but as we show, this comes at the cost of additional measurement disturbance. We experimentally demonstrate such a system and characterize the tradeoffs by considering the channel capacity required to erase the effect of a measurement.
Abstract Quantum mechanics is usually formulated with an implicit assumption that agents who can observe and interact with the world are external to it and have a classical memory. However, there is no accepted way to define the quantum–classical cut and no a priori reason to rule out fully quantum agents with coherent quantum memories. In this work, we introduce an entirely quantum notion of measurement, called a sensation, to account for quantum agents that experience the world through quantum sensors. Sensations eschew probabilities and instead describe a deterministic flow of quantum information. We quantify the information gain and disturbance of a sensation using concepts from quantum information theory and find that sensations always disturb at least as much as they inform. Viewing measurements as sensations could lead to a new understanding of quantum theory in general and to new results in the context of quantum networks.
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Quantum mechanics is usually formulated with an implicit assumption that agents who can observe and interact with the world are external to it and have a classical memory. Quantum measurement theory has consequently been formally defined with such external agents in mind, and its predictions match our classical experience. There is however no accepted way to define the quantum-classical cut and (if quantum theory is universal) no a priori reason to rule out fully quantum agents with coherent quantum memories. In this work we extend the definition of measurement to account for observers with quantum memories who need not experience the world in the way we do. We define measurements without probabilities, and show that information gain and uncertainty can still be quantified in a meaningful way. The results demonstrate how quantum agents observe the world in a way that cannot be accounted for in the usual language of observables and POVMs. This approach to measurements could lead to a new understanding of quantum theory in general and to new results in the context of quantum networks.
The ability to gather information and to act upon it is at the core of every learning agent. But what is the impact of quantum mechanics on an agent's ability to sense external inputs and to translate them into actions? Here we address the question for a prototype task of learning agency at the quantum scale: rotating a single spin based on information gathered by a single atom. We determine the ultimate performance limit for this task, revealing a fundamental tradeoff between entanglement at the sensing stage and coherence at the action stage: if the single-atom sensor is not entangled with the quantum system serving as the agent's internal memory, then the best learning strategy requires a coherent transfer of quantum information from the sensor to the system that controls the agent's actions. In contrast, if the sensor is initially entangled with the agent's memory, then the transfer of quantum information is no longer necessary. Our results indicate that the quantum properties of the sensor radically affect the optimal way to convert external stimuli into actions, revealing a link between quantum sensing and the behavior of quantum agents.
In the general theory of quantum measurement, one associates a positive-semidefinite operator on a ddd-dimensional Hilbert space to each of the nnn possible outcomes of an arbitrary measurement. In the special case of a projective measurement, these operators are pairwise Hilbert-Schmidt orthogonal, but when n>dn>dn>d, orthogonality is restricted by positivity. This restriction allows us to more precisely state the quantum adage: information gain of a system is always accompanied by unavoidable disturbance. Specifically, we investigate three properties of a measurement with L\"uders rule updating: its disturbance, a measure of how the expected postmeasurement state deviates from the input; its measurement strength, a measure of the intrinsic information producing capacity of the measurement; and its orthogonality, a measure of the degree to which the measurement operators differ from an orthonormal set. These quantities satisfy an information-disturbance tradeoff relation that highlights the additional role played by orthogonality. Finally, we assess several classes of measurements on these grounds and identify symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements as the unique quantum analogs of a perfectly informative and nondisturbing classical ideal measurement.
In the general theory of quantum measurement, one associates a positive semidefinite operator on a ddd-dimensional Hilbert space to each of the nnn possible outcomes of an arbitrary measurement. In the special case of a projective measurement, these operators are pairwise Hilbert--Schmidt orthogonal, but when n>dn>dn>d, orthogonality is restricted by positivity. This restriction has consequences which are not present from a classical perspective; in particular, we find it allows us to more precisely state the old quantum adage that it is impossible to extract information from a system without disturbance. Restricting attention throughout to the Luders state updating rule, we consider three properties of a measurement: its disturbance, a measure of how the expected post-measurement state deviates from the input state, its purity gain, a measure of the expected reduction of uncertainty resulting from measurement, and its orthogonality, a measure of the degree to which the measurement operators differ from an orthonormal set. We show that these quantities satisfy a simple algebraic relation amounting to an expression of an information-disturbance trade-off. Finally, we assess several classes of measurements on these grounds and identify symmetric informationally complete quantum measurements as the unique quantum analogs of a perfectly informative and nondisturbing classical ideal measurement.