The existence of incompatible measurement setups is one of the distinctive features of quantum theory. Here we extend the notion of incompatibility from measurements that test preparations to measurements that test dynamical processes. Such measurements, known as testers, consist of the preparation of an input state, the application of the tested process, and a measurement on the output. Mathematically, testers are described by a suitable generalization of the notion of positive operator-valued measure (POVM). Unlike in the case of POVMs, however, testers that commute are not necessarily compatible, and testers that are compatible do not necessarily commute. Given a set of testers, we define the robustness of incompatibility as the minimum amount of mixing needed to make the testers compatible. We show that (i) the robustness is lower bounded by the distinguishability of the input states prepared by the different testers, and (ii) maximum robustness is attained when the input states are orthogonal. An extensive analysis of incompatibility is provided for factorized qubit testers with two outcomes. All our results can be extended to measurements that test quantum processes consisting of multiple time steps.
The existence of incompatible measurement setups is one of the distinctive features of quantum theory. Here we extend the notion of incompatibility from measurements that test preparations to measurements that test dynamical processes. Such measurements, known as testers, consist of the preparation of an input state, the application of the tested process, and a measurement on the output. Mathematically, testers are described by a suitable generalization of the notion of positive operator-valued measure (POVM). Unlike in the case of POVMs, however, testers that commute are not necessarily compatible, and testers that are compatible do not necessarily commute. Given a set of testers, we define the robustness of incompatibility as the minimum amount of mixing needed to make the testers compatible. We show that (i) the robustness is lower bounded by the distinguishability of the input states prepared by the different testers, and (ii) maximum robustness is attained when the input states are orthogonal. An extensive analysis of incompatibility is provided for factorized qubit testers with two outcomes. All our results can be extended to measurements that test quantum processes consisting of multiple time steps.
The existence of incompatible measurements, epitomized by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is one of the distinctive features of quantum theory. So far, quantum incompatibility has been studied for measurements that test the preparation of physical systems. Here we extend the notion to measurements that test dynamical processes, possibly consisting of multiple time steps. Such measurements are known as testers and are implemented by interacting with the tested process through a sequence of state preparations, interactions, and measurements. Our first result is a characterization of the incompatibility of quantum testers, for which we provide necessary and sufficient conditions. Then we propose a quantitative measure of incompatibility. We call this measure the robustness of incompatibility and define it as the minimum amount of noise that has to be added to a set of testers in order to make them compatible. We show that (i) the robustness is lower bounded by the distinguishability of the sequence of interactions used by the tester and (ii) maximum robustness is attained when the interactions are perfectly distinguishable. The general results are illustrated in the concrete example of binary testers probing the time evolution of a single-photon polarization.
Measurement compatibility asks whether a family of quantum measurements can be simulated by one parent measurement followed by classical post-processing. We extend this measurement compatibility to the notion of \emph{d-compatibility} for measurements, channels, and instruments whose parent passes a d-dimensional quantum system and unlimited classical information to the post-processing. We formulate d-compatibility as a common linear factorization of operator spaces and operator systems and show that d-compatible families form a closed set, even with infinitely many settings and a separable infinite-dimensional input. To certify d-incompatibility, we define the compatibility functional as the smallest product of completely bounded norms over common factorizations through a d-dimensional register. Using factorization theory of operator spaces, we show that measure-and-prepare channels defined in terms of mutually unbiased bases and pinching channels defined in terms of Heisenberg-Weyl operators are d-incompatible in certain regimes of d. We also link d-compatibility of multi-instruments to the preparability of Choi assemblages using channel-state duality, and use this connection to show that for bipartite states the (in)compatibility of instruments can be used to certify Schmidt numbers and the implementability of the instrument using one-way LOCC protocols. Finally, our compatibility functional also bounds the generalized robustness of compatibility, which we interpret through a memory-bounded nontransient preparation game.
The existence of incompatible measurements is a fundamental phenomenon having no explanation in classical physics. Intuitively, one considers given measurements to be incompatible within a framework of a physical theory, if their simultaneous implementation on a single physical device is prohibited by the theory itself. In the mathematical language of quantum theory, measurements are described by POVMs (positive operator valued measures), and given POVMs are by definition incompatible if they cannot be obtained via coarse-graining from a single common POVM; this notion generalizes noncommutativity of projective measurements. In quantum theory, incompatibility can be regarded as a resource necessary for manifesting phenomena such as Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) Bell inequality violations or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering which do not have classical explanation. We define operational ways of quantifying this resource via the amount of added classical noise needed to render the measurements compatible, i.e., useless as a resource. In analogy to entanglement measures, we generalize this idea by introducing the concept of incompatibility measure, which is monotone in local operations. In this paper, we restrict our consideration to binary measurements, which are already sufficient to explicitly demonstrate nontrivial features of the theory. In particular, we construct a family of incompatibility monotones operationally quantifying violations of certain scaled versions of the CHSH Bell inequality, prove that they can be computed via a semidefinite program, and show how the noise-based quantities arise as special cases. We also determine maximal violations of the new inequalities, demonstrating how Tsirelson's bound appears as a special case. The resource aspect is further motivated by simple quantum protocols where our incompatibility monotones appear as relevant figures of merit.
In many a traditional physics textbook, a quantum measurement is defined as a projective measurement represented by a Hermitian operator. In quantum information theory, however, the concept of a measurement is dealt with in complete generality and we are therefore forced to confront the more general notion of positive-operator valued measures (POVMs), which suffice to describe all measurements that can be implemented in quantum experiments. We study the (in)compatibility of such POVMs and show that quantum theory realizes all possible (in)compatibility relations among sets of POVMs. This is in contrast to the restricted case of projective measurements for which commutativity is essentially equivalent to compatibility. Our result therefore points out a fundamental feature with respect to the (in)compatibility of quantum observables that has no analog in the case of projective measurements.
Abstract We describe and realize an experimental procedure for assessing the incompatibility of two qubit measurements. The experiment consists in a state discrimination task where either measurement is used according to some partial intermediate information. The success statistics of the task provides an upper bound for the amount of incompatibility of the two measurements, as it is quantified by means of their incompatibility robustness. For a broad class of unbiased and possibly noisy qubit measurements, one can make this upper bound coincide with the true value of the robustness by suitably tuning the preparation of the experiment. We demonstrate this fact in an optical setup, where the qubit states are encoded into the photons’ polarization degrees of freedom, and incompatibility is directly accessed by virtue of a refined control on the amplitude, phase and purity of the final projection stage of the measurements. Our work thus establishes the practical feasibility of a recently proposed method for the detection of quantum incompatibility.
The incompatibility between quantum measurements (as mathematically represented by positive operator-valued measures, i.e., POVMs) is a key feature of quantum mechanics and is intrinsically related to the noncommutativity of operators. For both theoretical and practical considerations, it is desirable to quantify the degree of incompatibility between quantum measurements, and considerable effort has been devoted to this issue. In this paper, we provide a novel approach to measurement incompatibility by exploiting the Lüders channels derived from POVMs and employing the measurement disturbance to quantify incompatibility. This is achieved by constructing an approximately joint measurement for a pair of POVMs, which is an enlarged POVM with the correct marginal property for one of the two POVMs but not necessarily for the other. The degree of failure of the marginal property for the other POVM is a kind of measurement disturbance and can be naturally interpreted as a quantifier of the incompatibility between the two POVMs. We reveal basic properties of this quantifier of measurement incompatibility, identify its maximal value in some cases, compare it with several popular measures in the literature, and illustrate it with some typical examples. Some related open issues are also discussed.