We consider entropic uncertainty relations for outcomes of the measurements of a quantum state in 3 or more mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), chosen from the standard construction of MUBs in prime dimension. We show that, for any choice of 3 MUBs and at least one choice of a larger number of MUBs, the best possible entropic uncertainty relation can be only marginally better than the one that trivially follows from the relation by Maassen and Uffink for 2 bases.
We consider entropic uncertainty relations for outcomes of the measurements of a quantum state in 3 or more mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), chosen from the standard construction of MUBs in prime dimension. We show that, for any choice of 3 MUBs and at least one choice of a larger number of MUBs, the best possible entropic uncertainty relation can be only marginally better than the one that trivially follows from the relation by Maassen and Uffink for 2 bases.
We prove tight entropic uncertainty relations for a large number of mutually unbiased measurements. In particular, we show that a bound derived from the result by Maassen and Uffink [Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 1103 (1988)] for two such measurements can in fact be tight for up to d measurements in mutually unbiased bases. We then show that using more mutually unbiased bases does not always lead to a better locking effect. We prove that the optimal bound for the accessible information using up to d specific mutually unbiased bases is logd∕2, which is the same as can be achieved by using only two bases. Our result indicates that merely using mutually unbiased bases is not sufficient to achieve a strong locking effect and we need to look for additional properties.
Quantum uncertainty relations impose fundamental limits on the joint knowledge that can be acquired from complementary observables: Perfect knowledge of a quantum state in one basis implies maximal indetermination in all other mutually unbiased bases (MUBs). Uncertainty relations derived from joint properties of the MUBs are generally assumed to be uniform, irrespective of the specific observables chosen within a set. In this work, we demonstrate instead that the uncertainty relations can depend on the choice of observables. Through both experimental observation and numerical methods, we show that selecting different sets of three MUBs in a five-dimensional quantum system results in distinct uncertainty bounds, i.e., in varying degrees of complementarity, in terms of both entropy and variance.
Entropic Uncertainty relations are powerful tools, especially in quantum cryptography. They typically bound the amount of uncertainty a third-party adversary may hold on a measurement outcome as a result of the measurement overlap. However, when the two measurement bases are biased towards one another, standard entropic uncertainty relations do not always provide optimal lower bounds on the entropy. Here, we derive a new entropic uncertainty relation, for certain quantum states, which can provide a significantly higher bound even if the two measurement bases are no longer mutually unbiased. We evaluate our bound on two different quantum cryptographic protocols, including BB84 with faulty/biased measurement devices, and show that our new bound can produce substantially higher key-rates under several scenarios when compared with prior work using standard entropic uncertainty relations.
Entropic uncertainty relations place nontrivial lower bounds to the sum of Shannon information entropies for noncommuting observables. Here we obtain a lower bound on the entropy sum for general pairs of observables in finite-dimensional Hilbert space, which improves on the best bound known to date [H. Maassen and J. B. M. Uffink, Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 1103 (1988)] for a wide class of observables. This result follows from another formulation of the uncertainty principle, the Landau-Pollak inequality, whose relationship to the Maassen-Uffink entropic uncertainty relation is discussed.
In the framework of mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), a measurement in one basis gives no information about the outcomes of measurements in another basis. Here we relax the no-information condition by allowing the d outcomes to be predicted according to a predefined probability distribution $q=({q}_{0},...,{q}_{d\ensuremath{-}1})$. The notion of mutual unbiasedness, however, is preserved by requiring that the extracted information is the same for any preparation and any measurement; regardless of which state from which basis is chosen to prepare the system, the outcomes of measuring the system with respect to the other basis generate the same probability distribution. In light of this, we define the notion of mutually equibiased bases (MEBs) such that within each basis the states are equibiased with respect to the states of the other basis and that the bases are mutually equibiased with respect to each other. For d=2,3, we derive a set of d+1 MEBs. The mutual equibiasedness imposes nontrivial constraints on the distribution q, leading, for d=3, to the restriction $1/3\ensuremath{\le}\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\le}1/2$, where $\ensuremath{\mu}={\ensuremath{\sum}}_{k=0}^{2}{q}_{k}^{2}$. To capture the incompatibility of the measurements in MEBs, we derive an inequality for the probabilities of projective measurements in a qudit system, which yields an associated entropic uncertainty inequality. Finally, we construct a class of positive maps and their associated entanglement witnesses based on MEBs. While an entanglement witness constructed from MUBs is generally finer than one based on MEBs when both use the same number of bases, for certain values of the index $\ensuremath{\mu}$, employing a larger set of MEBs can yield a finer witness. We illustrate this behavior using isotropic states of a $3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}3$ system. Our results reveal that not all bases in a set of L MEBs can contribute to the entanglement detection. A constraint, dependent on the probability distribution q, limits the number of MEBs that can be employed.