Weakly Disturbing Phase Space Measurements in Quantum Mechanics

RENARD, Bryan

Angela Karanjai, Eric G. Cavalcanti, Stephen D. Bartlett +1 more

Weak measurement of a quantum system followed by postselection based on a subsequent strong measurement gives rise to a quantity called the weak value : a complex number for which the interpretation has long been debated. We analyse the procedure of weak measurement and postselection, and the interpretation of the associated weak value, using a theory of classical mechanics supplemented by an epistemic restriction that is known to be operationally equivalent to a subtheory of quantum mechanics. Both the real and imaginary components of the weak value appear as phase space displacements in the postselected expectation values of the measurement device's position and momentum distributions, and we recover the same displacements as in the quantum case by studying the corresponding evolution in our theory of classical mechanics with an epistemic restriction. By using this epistemically restricted theory, we gain insight into the appearance of the weak value as a result of the statistical effects of post selection, and this provides us with an operational interpretation of the weak value, both its real and imaginary parts. We find that the imaginary part of the weak value is a measure of how much postselection biases the mean phase space distribution for a given amount of measurement disturbance. All such biases proportional to the imaginary part of the weak value vanish in the limit where disturbance due to measurement goes to zero. Our analysis also offers intuitive insight into how measurement disturbance can be minimized and the limits of weak measurement.

Allen Lobo, Carlos Alberto de Lima Ribeiro

Catarina Bastos, Alex E. Bernardini, Orfeu Bertolami A +2 more

Ozawa's measurement-disturbance relation is generalized to a phase-space noncommutative extension of quantum mechanics. It is shown that the measurement-disturbance relations have additional terms for backaction evading quadrature amplifiers and for noiseless quadrature transducers. Several distinctive features appear as a consequence of the noncommutative extension: measurement interactions which are noiseless, and observables which are undisturbed by a measurement, or of independent intervention in ordinary quantum mechanics, may acquire noise, become disturbed by the measurement, or no longer be an independent intervention in noncommutative quantum mechanics. It is also found that there can be states which violate Ozawa's universal noise-disturbance trade-off relation, but verify its noncommutative deformation.

Robert F. O’Connell, Daniel F. Walls

Jens Peder Dahl