We revisit the connection between the complementarity and uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics within the framework of Mach?Zehnder interferometry. We focus our attention on the trade-off relation between complementary path information and fringe visibility. This relation is equivalent to the uncertainty relation of Schrödinger and Robertson for a suitably chosen pair of observables. We show that it is equivalent as well to the uncertainty inequality provided by Landau and Pollak. We also study the relationship of this trade-off relation with a family of entropic uncertainty relations based on Rényi entropies. There is no equivalence in this case, but the different values of the entropic parameter do define regimes that provides us with a tool to discriminate between non-trivial states of minimum uncertainty. The existence of such regimes agrees with previous results of Luis (2011 Phys. Rev. A 84 034101), although their meaning was not sufficiently clear. We discuss the origin of these regimes with the intention of gaining a deeper understanding of entropic measures.
We revisit the connection between the complementarity and uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics within the framework of Mach?Zehnder interferometry. We focus our attention on the trade-off relation between complementary path information and fringe visibility. This relation is equivalent to the uncertainty relation of Schrödinger and Robertson for a suitably chosen pair of observables. We show that it is equivalent as well to the uncertainty inequality provided by Landau and Pollak. We also study the relationship of this trade-off relation with a family of entropic uncertainty relations based on Rényi entropies. There is no equivalence in this case, but the different values of the entropic parameter do define regimes that provides us with a tool to discriminate between non-trivial states of minimum uncertainty. The existence of such regimes agrees with previous results of Luis (2011 Phys. Rev. A 84 034101), although their meaning was not sufficiently clear. We discuss the origin of these regimes with the intention of gaining a deeper understanding of entropic measures.
We revisit the connection between the complementarity and uncertainty principles of quantum mechanics within the framework of Mach–Zehnder interferometry. We focus our attention on the trade-off relation between complementary path information and fringe visibility. This relation is equivalent to the uncertainty relation of Schrödinger and Robertson for a suitably chosen pair of observables. We show that it is equivalent as well to the uncertainty inequality provided by Landau and Pollak. We also study the relationship of this trade-off relation with a family of entropic uncertainty relations based on Rényi entropies. There is no equivalence in this case, but the different values of the entropic parameter do define regimes that provides us with a tool to discriminate between non-trivial states of minimum uncertainty. The existence of such regimes agrees with previous results of Luis (2011 Phys. Rev. A 84 034101), although their meaning was not sufficiently clear. We discuss the origin of these regimes with the intention of gaining a deeper understanding of entropic measures.
A coherent account of the connections and contrasts between the principles of com-plementarity and uncertainty is developed starting from a survey of the various formalizations of these principles. The conceptual analysis is illustrated by means of a set of experimental schemes based on Mach-Zehnder interferometry. In particu-lar, path detection via entanglement with a probe system and (quantitative) quan-tum erasure are exhibited to constitute instances of joint unsharp measurements of complementary pairs of physical quantities, path and interference observables. The analysis uses the representation of observables as positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs). The reconciliation of complementary experimental options in the sense of simultaneous unsharp preparations and measurements is expressed in terms of uncertainty relations of different kinds. The feature of complementarity, manifest in the present examples in the mutual exclusivity of path detection and interference observation, is recovered as a limit case from the appropriate uncertainty relation. It is noted that the complementarity and uncertainty principles are neither completely logically independent nor logical consequences of one another. Since entanglement is an instance of the uncertainty of quantum properties (of compound systems), it is moot to play out uncertainty and entanglement against each other as possible mechanisms enforcing complementarity.
This thesis is concerned with the notions of complementarity and uncertainty encountered in quantum mechanics. Its starting point is an assessment of how these concepts have been represented and illustrated by various writers dating back to their inception. Following the survey a coherent account of the connections and contrasts between complementarity and uncertainty is developed in the context of Mach-Zehnder interferometry. The effect on the interference pattern contrast of path detection via entanglement with a probe system, is explored and a joint unsharp measurement scheme of the complementary pairs, path and interference, described. The Mach-Zehnder set-up proves sufficiently versatile to show that quantum erasure and quantitative quantum erasure constitute instances of joint unsharp measurement of complementary observables. The analysis uses the representation of observables as positive operator valued measures.Path detection and interference observation require different experimental set-ups but can be reconciled in the simultaneous unsharp measurement and preparation. This reconciliation is expressed as an uncertainty relation however the mutually exclusive feature of complementarity is not discarded. It is possible to recover strict complementarity as a limit case of the appropriate uncertainty relation.One motivation for this study is the effort some authors have made in trying to express the founding features of quantum mechanics in the form of a hierarchy of significance. Here it is shown that complementarity and uncertainty have separate identities but are not completely independent of each other. Consequently, establishing a hierarchy of these features within the present formalism of quantum mechanics is not possible.
Coherence and complementarity are two important themes in quantum mechanics, which have been widely and thoroughly investigated. Recently, with the rapid development of quantum information theory, various measures have been introduced for quantitatively studying the coherence and complementarity. However, most of these studies are independent of each other in that they focus on only one theme, for example, the wave-particle duality and Heisenberg uncertainty principle are usually regarded as manifestation of Bohr’s complementary principle, while coherence is a quantum feature closely related to quantum superposition. During the past few years, there has been a flurry of research interest in the study of quantum coherence from the quantum resource-theoretic point of view. In this paper, we establish two information conservation relations and employ them to characterize complementarity and quantum coherence. As an illustration of the main results, we discuss these two themes in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Our study reveals that these two quantum themes are closely related to each other. Our main results are listed as follows. Firstly, we establish two information conservation relations, one is based on " Bures distance versus fidelity” and the other based on " symmetry versus asymmetry”. Then we employ these information conservation relations to investigate coherence and complementarity. Specifically, we provide an explanation of the " Bures distance versus fidelity” trade-off relation from the information conservation perspective, establish the link between the information conservation relation and wave-particle duality, and derive the famous Englert inequality concerning " fringe visibility versus path distinguishability” from the information conservation relation. Furthermore, in the general framework of state-channel interaction, we derive " symmetry versus asymmetry” trade-off relation and explain it as an information conservation relation, reveal its intrinsic relations with coherence and complementarity. Lastly, we demonstrate that the two information conservation relations are closely interrelated, and we also discuss the coherence, decoherence and complementarity in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, explicitly, we reveal that the Bures distance can be regarded as a lower bound of the asymmetry of state-channel interaction while fidelity is an upper bound of the symmetry of state-channel interaction. We expect that our information conservation relation can provide a unified framework for the study of coherence and complementarity.
Abstract Reality of quantum observables, a feature of long-standing interest within foundations of quantum mechanics, has recently been quantified and deeply studied by means of entropic measures (Dieguez and Angelo 2018 Phys. Rev . A 97 022107). However, there is no state-independent ‘reality trade-off’ between non-commuting observables, as in certain systems all observables are real (Bilobran and Angelo 2015 Europhys. Lett . 112 40005). We show that the entropic uncertainty relation in the presence of quantum memory (Berta et al 2010 Nat. Phys . 6 659) perfectly supplements the discussed notion of reality, rendering trade-offs between reality and quantum uncertainty. State-independent complementarity inequalities involving entropic measures of both, uncertainty and reality, for two observables are presented.
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.