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Frontiers of Physics

Uncertainty relations for general phase spaces

Reinhard F. Werner

Published Mar 31, 2016• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We describe a setup for obtaining uncertainty relations for arbitrary pairs of observables related by a Fourier transform. The physical examples discussed here are the standard position and momentum, number and angle, finite qudit systems, and strings of qubits for quantum information applications. The uncertainty relations allow for an arbitrary choice of metric for the outcome distance, and the choice of an exponent distinguishing, e.g., absolute and root mean square deviations. The emphasis of this article is on developing a unified treatment, in which one observable takes on values in an arbitrary locally compact Abelian group and the other in the dual group. In all cases, the phase space symmetry implies the equality of measurement and preparation uncertainty bounds. There is also a straightforward method for determining the optimal bounds.

DOI
10.1007/s11467-016-0558-5

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We describe a setup for obtaining uncertainty relations for arbitrary pairs of observables related by a Fourier transform. The physical examples discussed here are the standard position and momentum, number and angle, finite qudit systems, and strings of qubits for quantum information applications. The uncertainty relations allow for an arbitrary choice of metric for the outcome distance, and the choice of an exponent distinguishing, e.g., absolute and root mean square deviations. The emphasis of this article is on developing a unified treatment, in which one observable takes on values in an arbitrary locally compact Abelian group and the other in the dual group. In all cases, the phase space symmetry implies the equality of measurement and preparation uncertainty bounds. There is also a straightforward method for determining the optimal bounds.
We describe a setup for obtaining uncertainty relations for arbitrary pairs of observables related by a Fourier transform. The physical examples discussed here are the standard position and momentum, number and angle, finite qudit systems, and strings of qubits for quantum information applications. The uncertainty relations allow for an arbitrary choice of metric for the outcome distance, and the choice of an exponent distinguishing, e.g., absolute and root mean square deviations. The emphasis of this article is on developing a unified treatment, in which one observable takes on values in an arbitrary locally compact Abelian group and the other in the dual group. In all cases, the phase space symmetry implies the equality of measurement and preparation uncertainty bounds. There is also a straightforward method for determining the optimal bounds.
Measurement uncertainty relations are lower bounds on the errors of any approximate joint measurement of two or more quantum observables. The aim of this paper is to provide methods to compute optimal bounds of this type. The basic method is semidefinite programming, which we apply to arbitrary finite collections of projective observables on a finite dimensional Hilbert space. The quantification of errors is based on an arbitrary cost function, which assigns a penalty to getting result x rather than y, for any pair ( x , y ) . This induces a notion of optimal transport cost for a pair of probability distributions, and we include an Appendix with a short summary of optimal transport theory as needed in our context. There are then different ways to form an overall figure of merit from the comparison of distributions. We consider three, which are related to different physical testing scenarios. The most thorough test compares the transport distances between the marginals of a joint measurement and the reference observables for every input state. Less demanding is a test just on the states for which a “true value” is known in the sense that the reference observable yields a definite outcome. Finally, we can measure a deviation as a single expectation value by comparing the two observables on the two parts of a maximally-entangled state. All three error quantities have the property that they vanish if and only if the tested observable is equal to the reference. The theory is illustrated with some characteristic examples.
Measurement uncertainty relations are quantitative bounds on the errors in an approximate joint measurement of two observables. They can be seen as a generalization of the error/disturbance tradeoff first discussed heuristically by Heisenberg. Here we prove such relations for the case of two canonically conjugate observables like position and momentum, and establish a close connection with the more familiar preparation uncertainty relations constraining the sharpness of the distributions of the two observables in the same state. Both sets of relations are generalized to means of order α rather than the usual quadratic means, and we show that the optimal constants are the same for preparation and for measurement uncertainty. The constants are determined numerically and compared with some bounds in the literature. In both cases, the near-saturation of the inequalities entails that the state (resp. observable) is uniformly close to a minimizing one.
Abstract The uncertainty principle sets a limit to our capacity to predict the outcomes of two incompatible measurements. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation for two arbitrary observables A and B is usually discussed in textbooks. However, little or no attention is paid to the fact that Schrödinger generalised the Heisenberg relation taking into account the covariance between the observables A and B . This extended inequality is known as the Robertson–Schrödinger uncertainty relation. Here, we demonstrate the less known fact that two-level quantum states, i.e., qubits, satisfy the equality of the Robertson–Schrödinger uncertainty relation for two arbitrary observables A and B . Taking advantage of the homomorphism between SU(2) and SO(3) groups, it is possible to map the distributions of the expectation values and variances of the observables, and the Heisenberg and covariance terms on the Bloch sphere. The graphical visualisation of the relevant quantities involved in the uncertainty relations allows us to distinguish specific properties and symmetries that are not so evident in the algebraic formalism.
The well-known Robertson–Schrödinger uncertainty relations have state-dependent lower bounds, which are trivial for certain states. We present a general approach to deriving tight state-independent uncertainty relations for qubit measurements that completely characterise the obtainable uncertainty values. This approach can give such relations for any number of observables, and we do so explicitly for arbitrary pairs and triples of qubit measurements. We show how these relations can be transformed into equivalent tight entropic uncertainty relations. More generally, they can be expressed in terms of any measure of uncertainty that can be written as a function of the expectation value of the observable for a given state.
We study uncertainty relations for pairs of conjugate variables like number and angle, of which one takes integer values and the other takes values on the unit circle. The translation symmetry of the problem in either variable implies that measurement uncertainty and preparation uncertainty coincide quantitatively, and the bounds depend only on the choice of two metrics used to quantify the difference of number and angle outputs, respectively. For each type of observable, we discuss two natural choices of metric and discuss the resulting optimal bounds with both numerical and analytical methods. We also develop some simple and explicit (albeit not sharp) lower bounds, using an apparently new method for obtaining certified lower bounds to ground state problems.