The uncertainty principle can be understood as a condition of joint indeterminacy of classes of properties in quantum theory. The mathematical expressions most closely associated with this principle have been the uncertainty relations, various inequalities exemplified by the well known expression regarding position and momentum introduced by Heisenberg. Here, recent work involving a new sort of “logical” indeterminacy principle and associated relations introduced by Pitowsky, expressable directly in terms of probabilities of outcomes of measurements of sharp quantum observables, is reviewed and its quantum nature is discussed. These novel relations are derivable from Boolean “conditions of possible experience” of the quantum realm and have been considered both as fundamentally logical and as fundamentally geometrical. This work focuses on the relationship of indeterminacy to the propositions regarding the values of discrete, sharp observables of quantum systems. Here, reasons for favoring each of these two positions are considered. Finally, with an eye toward future research related to indeterminacy relations, further novel approaches grounded in category theory and intended to capture and reconceptualize the complementarity characteristics of quantum propositions are discussed in relation to the former.
The uncertainty principle can be understood as a condition of joint indeterminacy of classes of properties in quantum theory. The mathematical expressions most closely associated with this principle have been the uncertainty relations, various inequalities exemplified by the well known expression regarding position and momentum introduced by Heisenberg. Here, recent work involving a new sort of “logical” indeterminacy principle and associated relations introduced by Pitowsky, expressable directly in terms of probabilities of outcomes of measurements of sharp quantum observables, is reviewed and its quantum nature is discussed. These novel relations are derivable from Boolean “conditions of possible experience” of the quantum realm and have been considered both as fundamentally logical and as fundamentally geometrical. This work focuses on the relationship of indeterminacy to the propositions regarding the values of discrete, sharp observables of quantum systems. Here, reasons for favoring each of these two positions are considered. Finally, with an eye toward future research related to indeterminacy relations, further novel approaches grounded in category theory and intended to capture and reconceptualize the complementarity characteristics of quantum propositions are discussed in relation to the former.
A universal formulation of the quantum uncertainty regarding quantum indeterminacy, quantum measurement, and its inevitable observer effect is presented with additional focus on the representability of quantum observables over a given state. The operational tangibility of the framework assures that the resultant general relations admit natural operational interpretations and characterisations, and thereby perhaps most importantly, their experimental verifiability. In view of the universal formulation, Heisenberg's original philosophy of the uncertainty principle, most typically exemplified in his famous gamma-ray microscope Gedankenexperiment, is revisited; it is reformulated and restated as a refined no-go theorem, albeit perhaps in a weaker form than was originally intended. The relations entail, in essence as corollaries to their special cases, several previously known relations, including most notably the standard Kennard-Robertson relation, the Arthurs-Kelly-Goodman relations for joint measurement as well as the Ozawa and the Watanabe-Sagawa-Ueda relations for error and error-disturbance.
Uncertainty relations are commonly praised as one of the central pillars of quantum theory. Usually, they are taught in the first weeks of a beginners lecture, and introduced in the ?rst chapters of a textbook. However, their precise operational meaning and a formulation in a general context, i.e. beyond the example of position and momentum observables, are often left out. The reasoning for this is twofold: On one hand, an exact operational definition of uncertainty, indeterminacy and a corresponding uncertainty principle has been the content of many debates since the early days of quantum mechanics until today. From a modern perspective, we have the consent that there are at least the two notions of preparation and measurement uncertainty: the first notion prohibits the existence of dissipation free states and the latter one the existence of error free joint measurements. On the other hand, we have that, the mathematical tools, which are needed for comprehensive treatment of uncertainty relations in a general context, are still under development and usually go far beyond the mathematical level of an introductory course. In this thesis we will investigate these two notions of uncertainty, their corre- sponding uncertainty relations, such as their interplay. The aim of this thesis is to give answers to the central questions: (1.) Which quantities should be used to formulate uncertainty? (2.) How can we compute uncertainty relations for those? (3.) Are there connections between the two notions of uncertainty? We will do this, whenever possible, in a most general context and with a focus on relevant examples, otherwise. Therefore, we will consider constructions of mea- surement errors and deviation measures that quantify uncertainty, based on, so called, cost functions. Commonly used uncertainty measures like variances, en- tropies, and the Hamming distance are examples for these. We will investigate the structure of the corresponding uncertainty relations and provide several methods that enable us to compute them. The third question is addressed by a theorem that shows, for sharp observables, that measurement uncertainty relations can be lower bounded by preparation uncertainty relations, whenever the same cost function is used.
A novel uncertainty relation for errors of general quantum measurement is presented. The new relation, which is presented in geometric terms for maps representing measurement, is completely operational and can be related directly to tangible measurement outcomes. The relation violates the naïve bound ℏ/2 for the position-momentum measurement, whilst nevertheless respecting Heisenberg's philosophy of the uncertainty principle. The standard Kennard-Robertson uncertainty relation for state preparations expressed by standard deviations arises as a corollary to its special non-informative case. For the measurement on two-state quantum systems, the relation is found to offer virtually the tightest bound possible; the equality of the relation holds for the measurement performed over every pure state. The Ozawa relation for errors of quantum measurements will also be examined in this regard. In this paper, the Kolmogorovian measure-theoretic formalism of probability-which allows for the representation of quantum measurements by positive-operator valued measures (POVMs)-is given special attention, in regard to which some of the measure-theory specific facts are remarked along the exposition as appropriate.
refer to the joint measurement problem for noncommuting quantum observables: “One of the aspects of quantum theory which has attracted the most general attention, is the novelty of the logical notions which it presupposes. It asserts that even a complete mathematical description of a physical system S does not in general enable one to predict with certainty the result of an experiment on S, and that in particular one can never predict with certainty both the position and the momentum of S (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). It further asserts that most pairs of observations are incompatible, and cannot be made on S simultaneously (Principle of Non-commutativity of Observations).” The object of the present paper is to consider what approximate solution one may hope to find to the joint measurement problem. Our main conclusion, based on a rigorous notion of unsharp observable, is that one can reasonably expect to find approximate joint measurements for any pair of noncommuting sharp observables, provided a trade-off in the sense of a Heisenberg uncertainty relation for measurement inaccuracies is taken into account. In addition, it will be seen that as a consequence of the noncom-mutativity of the given observables, the approximating observables must have degrees of unsharpness that obey yet another trade-off relation in the spirit of Heisenberg’s principle. These connections will be
We propose a geometric formulation of quantum indeterminacy based on polar duality between convex bodies representing position and momentum data. A pair (X,P) of centrally symmetric convex bodies is said to satisfy the indeterminacy condition when the h-polar of X is included in P. We show that this condition naturally arises from the geometry of quantum blobs and is closely related to Hardy's uncertainty principle and the Donoho--Stark inequalities. Using symplectic capacities and John ellipsoids, we associate a canonical covariance ellipsoid with every quantum polar pair and prove that it satisfies the quantum condition. The Robertson--Schrödinger inequalities follow as a consequence. This provides a non-statistical formulation of quantum indeterminacy from which the usual uncertainty relations emerge. which the usual uncertainty relations emerge.
The so-called preparation uncertainty that occurs in the quantum world can be understood well in purely operational terms, and its existence in any given theory, perhaps differently than in quantum mechanics, can be verified by examining only measurement statistics. Namely, one says that uncertainty occurs in some theory when for some pair of observables, there is no preparation that would exhibit deterministic statistics for both of them. However, the right-hand side of the uncertainty relation is not operational anymore if we do not insist that it is just the minimum of the left-hand side for a given theory. For example, in quantum mechanics, it is some function of two observables that must be computed within the quantum formalism. Also, while joint nonmeasurability of observables is an operational notion, the complementarity in Bohr's sense (i.e., in terms of information needed to describe the system) has not yet been expressed in purely operational terms. Here we propose a general operational framework that provides answers to the above issues. We introduce an operational definition of complementarity and further postulate that complementary observables have to exhibit uncertainty, which means that we propose to put the (operational) complementarity as the right-hand side of the uncertainty relation. In particular, we identify two different notions of uncertainty and complementarity for which the above principle holds in the quantum-mechanical realm. We also introduce postulates for the general measures of uncertainty and complementarity. In order to define quantifiers of complementarity we first turn to the simpler notion of independence that is defined solely in terms of the statistics of two observables. Importantly, for clean and extremal observables---i.e., ones that cannot be simulated irreducibly by other observables---any measure of independence reduces to the proper complementary measure. Finally, as an application of our general framework we define a number of complementarity indicators and show that they can be used to state uncertainty relations. One of them, assuming some natural symmetries, leads to the Tsirelson bound for the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality. Lastly, we show that for a single system a variant of information causality called the information content principle, under the above symmetries, can be interpreted as an uncertainty relation in the above sense.