We introduce a resource monotone, the completeness stability, to quantify the quality of quantum measurements within a resource-theoretic framework. By viewing a quantum measurement as a frame, the minimum eigenvalue of a frame operator emerges as a significant monotone. It captures bounds on estimation errors and the numerical stability of inverting the frame operator to calculate the optimal dual for state reconstruction. Maximizing this monotone identifies a well-characterized class of quantum measurements forming weighted complex projective 2-designs, which includes well-known examples such as SIC-POVMs. Our results provide a principled framework for comparing and optimizing quantum measurements for practical applications.
We introduce a resource monotone, the completeness stability, to quantify the quality of quantum measurements within a resource-theoretic framework. By viewing a quantum measurement as a frame, the minimum eigenvalue of a frame operator emerges as a significant monotone. It captures bounds on estimation errors and the numerical stability of inverting the frame operator to calculate the optimal dual for state reconstruction. Maximizing this monotone identifies a well-characterized class of quantum measurements forming weighted complex projective 2-designs, which includes well-known examples such as SIC-POVMs. Our results provide a principled framework for comparing and optimizing quantum measurements for practical applications.
Quantum measurements lie at the core of quantum information processing, enabling tasks ranging from state reconstruction and parameter estimation to sensing and computation. As quantum technologies scale and become increasingly precise, a central question emerges: what does it mean for a quantum measurement to be good? This thesis addresses this question by developing quantitative, operational, and physically grounded frameworks for assessing the quality and informational power of quantum measurements.The first part of the thesis focuses on the intrinsic quality of quantum measurements independent of any particular input state. Adopting the formalism of quantum resource theories, measurements are treated as resources ordered under classical post-processing, which cannot increase informational content. Restricting attention to informationally complete measurements, we employ frame theory to introduce a novel resource monotone termed completeness stability, defined as the minimum eigenvalue of a suitably scaled frame operator. We establish its operational significance by showing that the average error in quantum state tomography and the average variance in shadow tomography are tightly bounded by the inverse of the completeness stability. Maximizing this monotone identifies weighted complex projective 2-designs, including symmetric informationally complete POVMs and mutually unbiased bases, as optimal measurement configurations.The second part of the thesis extends these ideas to quantum parameter estimation, where measurement performance necessarily depends on correlations between the measurement and the encoded quantum state. By introducing a state-dependent inner product on operator space, we develop an operator-theoretic formulation in which both the classical and quantum Fisher information arise naturally from a single frame operator associated with the measurement and the reference state. Within this framework, the spectral properties of the frame operator provide a complete characterization of estimation performance. The maximum and minimum eigenvalues identify the best- and worst-case parameter-encoding directions, respectively, yielding sharp bounds on the achievable ratio of classical and quantum Fisher information. This establishes a direct connection between informational completeness, estimation robustness, and resource-theoretic monotonicity.The final part of the thesis returns to foundational questions concerning quantum measurement and arrival time. Using Bohmian mechanics, we develop a microscopic, first-principles account of the Hong–Ou–Mandel effect, a paradigmatic two-particle interference phenomenon. By analyzing particle trajectories guided by the wave function, we show how bosonic bunching and fermionic anti-bunching emerge dynamically from the guiding equation without invoking wave-function collapse. Beyond reproducing the Hong–Ou–Mandel dip, we demonstrate how experimental parameters such as barrier strength, phase velocity, and path asymmetry influence both coincidence probabilities and temporal correlations.Taken together, this thesis provides a unified treatment of quantum measurement quality across operational, metrological, and dynamical regimes. By bridging resource theory, frame theory, Fisher information, and trajectory-based quantum dynamics, it offers new insights into the structure, limitations, and physical interpretation of quantum measurements in both applied and foundational contexts.
Many quantum information processing tasks require the consumption of various types of informational resource. Entanglement is a well-studied example of this type of resource; frameness is another. Both types of resource may be quantified through the use of realvalued functions known as monotones, a collection of which can fully characterize the resourcefulness of a state. A complete characterization of the entanglement or frameness of even a finite-dimensional quantum state might require an infinite collection of monotones, despite finiteness of the descriptions of the states in question. We propose a new framework of relative monotones. A relative monotone quantifies the resourcefulness of a quantum state relative to another quantum state. We give an example of the efficacy of relative monotones by characterizing a simple type of frameness with a single relative monotone. This type of frameness is unlikely to yield to analysis with 'absolute' monotones.
Randomized measurement protocols such as classical shadows represent powerful resources for quantum technologies, with applications ranging from quantum state characterization and process tomography to machine learning and error mitigation. Recently, the notion of measurement dual frames, in which classical shadows are generalized to dual operators of positive operator-valued measure (POVM) effects, resurfaced in the literature. This brought attention to additional degrees of freedom in the postprocessing stage of randomized measurements that are often neglected by established techniques. In this work, we leverage dual frames to construct improved observable estimators from informationally complete measurement samples. We introduce novel classes of parametrized frame superoperators and optimization-free dual frames based on empirical frequencies, which offer advantages over their canonical counterparts while retaining computational efficiency. Remarkably, this comes at almost no quantum or classical cost, thus rendering dual frame optimization a valuable addition to the randomized measurement toolbox. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Informationally complete measurements form the foundation of universal quantum state reconstruction, while quantum parameter estimation is based on the local structure of the manifold of quantum states. Here we establish a general link between these two aspects, in the context of a single informationally complete measurement, by employing a suitably adapted operator frame theory. In particular, we bound the ratio between the classical and quantum Fisher information in terms of the spectral decomposition of the associated frame operator, and connect these bounds to the optimal and least optimal directions for parameter encoding. The geometric and operational characterization of information extraction thus obtained reveals the fundamental tradeoff imposed by informational completeness on local quantum parameter estimation.
The advantage that quantum systems provide for certain quantum information processing tasks over their classical counterparts can be quantified within the general framework of resource theories. Certain distance functions between quantum states have successfully been used to quantify resources like entanglement and coherence. Perhaps surprisingly, such a distance-based approach has not been adopted to study resources of quantum measurements, where other geometric quantifiers are used instead. Here, we define distance functions between sets of quantum measurements and show that they naturally induce resource monotones for convex resource theories of measurements. By focusing on a distance based on the diamond norm, we establish a hierarchy of measurement resources and derive analytical bounds on the incompatibility of any set of measurements. We show that these bounds are tight for certain projective measurements based on mutually unbiased bases and identify scenarios where different measurement resources attain the same value when quantified by our resource monotone. Our results provide a general framework to compare distance-based resources for sets of measurements and allow us to obtain limitations on Bell-type experiments.
The advantage that quantum systems provide for certain quantum information processing tasks over their classical counterparts can be quantified within the general framework of resource theories. Certain distance functions between quantum states have successfully been used to quantify resources like entanglement and coherence. Perhaps surprisingly, such a distance-based approach has not been adopted to study resources of quantum measurements, where other geometric quantifiers are used instead. Here, we define distance functions between sets of quantum measurements and show that they naturally induce resource monotones for convex resource theories of measurements. By focusing on a distance based on the diamond norm, we establish a hierarchy of measurement resources and derive analytical bounds on the incompatibility of any set of measurements. We show that these bounds are tight for certain projective measurements based on mutually unbiased bases and identify scenarios where different measurement resources attain the same value when quantified by our resource monotone. Our results provide a general framework to compare distance-based resources for sets of measurements and allow us to obtain limitations on Bell-type experiments.