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Covariant fuzzy observables and coarse-graining

Teiko Heinosaari, Pekka Lahti, Kari Ylinen

Published Dec 16, 2003• 16 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

A fuzzy observable is regarded as a smearing of a sharp observable, and the structure of covariant fuzzy observables is studied. It is shown that the covariant coarse-grainings of sharp observables are exactly the covariant fuzzy observables. A necessary and sufficient condition for a covariant fuzzy observable to be informationally equivalent to the corresponding sharp observable is given.

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A fuzzy observable is regarded as a smearing of a sharp observable, and the structure of covariant fuzzy observables is studied. It is shown that the covariant coarse-grainings of sharp observables are exactly the covariant fuzzy observables. A necessary and sufficient condition for a covariant fuzzy observable to be informationally equivalent to the corresponding sharp observable is given.
Using the quantum map formalism, we provide a framework to construct fuzzy and coarse-grained quantum maps of many-body systems that account for limitations in the resolution of real measurement devices probing them. The first set of maps handles particle-indexing errors, while the second deals with the effects of detectors that can only resolve a fraction of the system constituents. We apply these maps to a spin-1/2XX1/2 \mathit{XX}1/2XX chain, obtaining a blurred picture of the entanglement generation and propagation in the system. By construction, both maps are simply related via a partial trace, which allows us to concentrate on the properties of the former. We fully characterize the fuzzy map, identifying its symmetries and invariant spaces. We show that the volume of the tomographically accessible states decreases at a double-exponential rate in the number of particles, imposing severe bounds on the ability to read and use information of a many-body quantum system.
Joint measurements of qubit observables have recently been studied in conjunction with quantum information processing tasks such as cloning. Considerations of such joint measurements have until now been restricted to a certain class of observables that can be characterized by a form of covariance. Here we investigate conditions for the joint measurability of arbitrary pairs of qubit observables. For pairs of noncommuting sharp qubit observables, a notion of approximate joint measurement is introduced. Optimal approximate joint measurements are shown to lie in the class of covariant joint measurements. The marginal observables found to be optimal approximators are generally not among the coarse-grainings of the observables to be approximated. This yields scope for the improvement of existing joint measurement schemes. Both the quality of the approximations and the intrinsic unsharpness of the approximators are shown to be subject to Heisenberg-type uncertainty relations.