Deciding which sets of quantum measurements allow a simultaneous readout is a central problem in quantum measurement theory. The problem is relevant not only from the foundational perspective, but also has direct applications in quantum correlation problems fueled by incompatible measurements. Although central, only a few analytical criteria exist for deciding the incompatibility of general sets of measurements. This Letter approaches the problem through functions defined on the Boolean hypercube and their Fourier transformations. We show that this reformulation of the problem leads to a complete geometric characterization of joint measurability of any finite set of unbiased binary qubit measurements and gives a necessary condition for the biased case. We discuss our results in the realm of quantum steering, where they translate into a family of steering inequalities. When certain unbiasedness conditions are fulfilled, these criteria are tight, hence fully characterizing the steering problem when the trusted party holds a qubit, and the untrusted party performs any finite number of binary measurements. We further discuss how our results point towards a second-order cone programming approach to measurement incompatibility and compare this to the predominantly used semi-definite programming-based techniques. We use our approach to falsify an existing conjecture on measurement incompatibility of special sets of measurements.
Deciding which sets of quantum measurements allow a simultaneous readout is a central problem in quantum measurement theory. The problem is relevant not only from the foundational perspective, but also has direct applications in quantum correlation problems fueled by incompatible measurements. Although central, only a few analytical criteria exist for deciding the incompatibility of general sets of measurements. This Letter approaches the problem through functions defined on the Boolean hypercube and their Fourier transformations. We show that this reformulation of the problem leads to a complete geometric characterization of joint measurability of any finite set of unbiased binary qubit measurements and gives a necessary condition for the biased case. We discuss our results in the realm of quantum steering, where they translate into a family of steering inequalities. When certain unbiasedness conditions are fulfilled, these criteria are tight, hence fully characterizing the steering problem when the trusted party holds a qubit, and the untrusted party performs any finite number of binary measurements. We further discuss how our results point towards a second-order cone programming approach to measurement incompatibility and compare this to the predominantly used semi-definite programming-based techniques. We use our approach to falsify an existing conjecture on measurement incompatibility of special sets of measurements.
We consider the question of characterizing the incompatibility of sets of high-dimensional quantum measurements. We introduce the concept of measurement incompatibility in subspaces. That is, starting from a set of measurements that is incompatible, one considers the set of measurements obtained by projection onto any strict subspace of fixed dimension. We identify three possible forms of incompatibility in subspaces: (i) incompressible incompatibility---measurements that become compatible in every subspace, (ii) fully compressible incompatibility---measurements that remain incompatible in every subspace, and (iii) partly compressible incompatibility---measurements that are compatible in some subspace and incompatible in another. For each class, we discuss explicit examples. Finally, we present some applications of these ideas. First, we show that joint measurability and coexistence are two inequivalent notions of incompatibility in the simplest case of qubit systems. Second, we highlight the implications of our results for tests of quantum steering.
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.
Quantum measurements can be incompatible, i.e., they can fail to be jointly measurable. Recently, a weaker notion of joint-measurability, called partial joint-measurability, was proposed by Masini et al. in [Quantum 8, 1574 (2024)]. In this work, we further generalize this notion to the setting where only a subset of the outcomes of each measurement is required to be jointly determined by classical variables. We provide two mathematical formulations of partial joint-measurability and show that, like full joint-measurability, it can be decided by solving a single semidefinite program. We prove that in the case of an untrusted measurement device, an adversary Eve, limited to classical side information, can perfectly guess the outcomes of the measurement device if and only if the set of measurements is partially jointly measurable. We derive analytical thresholds on the detection efficiency below which generic measurements become partially jointly measurable. Such bounds directly yield limits on the robustness of device-independent and semi-device-independent quantum cryptographic protocols against detection inefficiency. In particular, our results highlight the importance of a careful treatment of postselection in security analyses.
The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.
Measurement incompatibility and bipartite quantum steering are known to display a strong connection: a set of measurements is incompatible if and only if it can lead to bipartite steering. Despite such a close link between these concepts in bipartite scenarios, little is known in the multipartite setting, where notions of genuine multipartite correlations play major roles. In this work we prove that, as in the bipartite case, incompatibility is also necessary and sufficient for genuine multipartite steering in any multipartite scenario with a single uncharacterised party. Interestingly, genuine multipartite steering can be extracted from any set of incompatible measurements using states which are not SLOCC equivalent, such as GHZ and W states. In contrast, we prove that this result does not hold in scenarios with more than one uncharacterised party, by presenting a set of incompatible measurements that can never lead to genuine multipartite steering in these cases. In order to obtain our main results, we introduce methods tailored for multipartite correlations, paving the way to understanding the role of measurement incompatibility beyond bipartite scenarios.
Several central problems in quantum information theory (such as measurement compatibility and quantum steering) can be rephrased as membership in the minimal matrix convex set corresponding to special polytopes (such as the hypercube or its dual). In this article, we generalize this idea and introduce the notion of polytope compatibility, by considering arbitrary polytopes. We find that semiclassical magic squares correspond to Birkhoff polytope compatibility. In general, we prove that polytope compatibility is in one-to-one correspondence with measurement compatibility, when the measurements have some elements in common and the post-processing of the joint measurement is restricted. Finally, we consider how much tuples of operators with appropriate joint numerical range have to be scaled in the worst case in order to become polytope compatible and give both analytical sufficient conditions and numerical ones based on linear programming.