Comment on 'White, T., Mutus, J., Dressel, J. et al., "Preserving entanglement during weak measurement demonstrated with a violation of the Bell-Leggett-Garg inequality", npj Quantum Information 2, 15022 (2016).'
In the paper cited in the title, experimental results were presented that clearly prove that the quantum entanglement between two qubits is preserved after weak enough measurements are performed on them. The theoretical interpretation of the reported results, however, requires further consideration.
In the cited paper [White, T., Mutus, J., Dressel, J. et al., Preserving entanglement during weak measurement demonstrated with a violation of the Bell-Leggett-Garg inequality, npj Quantum Information 2, 15022 (2016), arXiv:1504.02707], experimental results were presented that clearly prove that the quantum entanglement between two qubits is preserved after weak enough measurements are performed on them. The theoretical interpretation of the reported results, however, requires further consideration.
In the cited paper [White, T., Mutus, J., Dressel, J. et al., "Preserving entanglement during weak measurement demonstrated with a violation of the Bell-Leggett-Garg inequality", npj Quantum Information 2, 15022 (2016), arXiv:1504.02707], experimental results were presented that clearly prove that the quantum entanglement between two qubits is preserved after weak enough measurements are performed on them. The theoretical interpretation of the reported results, however, requires further consideration. The remarks made in this paper may have serious implications both for quantum foundations and for quantum cryptography.
With the recent surge of interest in quantum computation, it has become very important to develop clear experimental tests for "quantum behavior" in a system. This issue has been addressed in the past in the form of the inequalities due to Bell and those due to Leggett and Garg. These inequalities concern the results of ideal projective measurements, however, which are experimentally difficult to perform in many proposed qubit designs, especially in many solid-state qubit systems. Here, we show that weak continuous measurements, which are often practical to implement experimentally, can yield particularly clear signatures of quantum coherence, both in the measured correlation functions and in the measured power spectrum.
The Leggett-Garg inequalities probe the classical-quantum boundary by putting limits on the sum of pairwise correlation functions between classical measurement devices that consecutively measured the same quantum system. The apparent violation of these inequalities by standard quantum measurements has cast doubt on quantum mechanics' ability to consistently describe classical objects. Recent work has concluded that these inequalities cannot be violated by either strong or weak projective measurements [1]. Here I consider an entropic version of the Leggett-Garg inequalities that are different from the standard inequalities yet similar in form, and can be defined without reference to any particular observable. I find that the entropic inequalities also cannot be be violated by strong quantum measurements. The entropic inequalities can be extended to describe weak quantum measurements, and I show that these weak entropic Leggett-Garg inequalities cannot be violated either even though the quantum system remains unprojected, because the inequalities describe the classical measurement devices, not the quantum system. I conclude that quantum mechanics adequately describes classical devices, and that we should be careful not to assume that the classical devices accurately describe the quantum system.
Abstract Weak measurement has provided new insight into the nature of quantum measurement, by demonstrating the ability to extract average state information without fully projecting the system. For single-qubit measurements, this partial projection has been demonstrated with violations of the Leggett–Garg inequality. Here we investigate the effects of weak measurement on a maximally entangled Bell state through application of the Hybrid Bell–Leggett–Garg inequality (BLGI) on a linear chain of four transmon qubits. By correlating the results of weak ancilla measurements with subsequent projective readout, we achieve a violation of the BLGI with 27 s.d.s. of certainty.