Abstract A quantum measurement (e.g., positive-operator valued measure, or more generally, instrument) performed on a system state yields a post-measurement ensemble (a family of outcome states together with the corresponding outcome probabilities), which may have quantumness due to the impossibility to perfectly discriminate the constituent states. In order to characterize information contents and structure of a measurement, it is desirable to investigate the post-measurement ensemble. In this work, we study post-measurement quantumness (i.e., quantumness of the post-measurement ensemble) by introducing a Gram matrix summarizing the interaction between a measurement and a state, and explore its implications and consequences. Gram matrix of an ensemble can be regarded as a quantum state (density operator) in an auxiliary system with a computational basis labelling the measurement outcomes. Our basic idea is to exploit coherence of the Gram matrix (with respect to the computational basis of the auxiliary system) and employ it to quantify post-measurement quantumness . We propose several quantifiers of quantumness and reveal their basic properties. We further evaluate explicitly quantumness of measurements arising from several important quantum channels, and illustrate a comparison between them. This provides a method for investigating measurements from the perspective of coherence of Gram matrix.
Abstract A quantum measurement (e.g., positive-operator valued measure, or more generally, instrument) performed on a system state yields a post-measurement ensemble (a family of outcome states together with the corresponding outcome probabilities), which may have quantumness due to the impossibility to perfectly discriminate the constituent states. In order to characterize information contents and structure of a measurement, it is desirable to investigate the post-measurement ensemble. In this work, we study post-measurement quantumness (i.e., quantumness of the post-measurement ensemble) by introducing a Gram matrix summarizing the interaction between a measurement and a state, and explore its implications and consequences. Gram matrix of an ensemble can be regarded as a quantum state (density operator) in an auxiliary system with a computational basis labelling the measurement outcomes. Our basic idea is to exploit coherence of the Gram matrix (with respect to the computational basis of the auxiliary system) and employ it to quantify post-measurement quantumness . We propose several quantifiers of quantumness and reveal their basic properties. We further evaluate explicitly quantumness of measurements arising from several important quantum channels, and illustrate a comparison between them. This provides a method for investigating measurements from the perspective of coherence of Gram matrix.
The Gram matrix of a set of vectors, which encapsulates the relations between the constituent vectors, plays an important role in the exploration of both geometric and information-theoretic aspects of quantum state space. In view of its usefulness and importance, we study the Gram matrix of an ensemble of pure states (a set of pure states with a prior probability distribution) and reveal its fundamental properties. We highlight and exploit the fact that the Gram matrix of an ensemble can be formally regarded as a bona fide quantum state. The key idea is to employ coherence (with respect to the computational basis) of the Gram matrix (regarded as a quantum state) to quantify quantumness of the corresponding ensemble. In particular, we propose to use the l 1 -norm of coherence and the relative entropy of coherence, of the Gram matrix, as two significant quantifiers of quantumness. We illustrate the effectiveness and power of these quantifiers of quantumness by evaluating them for several important ensembles arising from quantum measurement and quantum cryptography. We further compare the quantumness based on the Gram matrix with various other quantifiers of quantumness in the literature, and show that although they are closely related in general, they have subtle differences and capture different aspects of ensembles, which shed light on the complexity of quantum ensembles.
Abstract The Gram matrix of an ensemble of pure states can be regarded as a quantum state, and the quantumness of the ensemble can be quantified by the coherence of the Gram matrix. By using the affinity between mixed states, the concept of Gram matrix of pure-state ensembles can be extended to the one of mixed-state ensembles. By utilizing the generalized α - z -relative Rényi entropy of coherence of Gram matrices, we present a new quantifier of quantumness of mixed-sate ensembles and further reveal its peculiar properties. To illustrate our quantumness of mixed-sate ensembles, we also calculate the quantumness for some detailed mixed-sate ensembles by deriving their analytical formulae.
The standard approach to quantum measurement discrimination is to perform the given unknown measurement on a probe state, possibly entangled with an auxiliary system, and make a decision based on the measurement outcome obtained. In this work, we go beyond the standard aforementioned scenarios by consider not only the classical measurement outcome of a measurement, but also its the post-measurement quantum state. More specifically, instead of considering only the positive-operator valued measure (POVM) operators, we consider their associated Lüders' instrument associated with them. We prove that, when the post-measurement quantum states are available, the task of discriminating two qubit projective measurements is equivalent to discriminating two copies of quantum states associated to each projector pair, extending previous results known for the case where probe states are separable. Then, we proceed by showing that the advantage of considering post-measurement states in measurement discrimination can be large. We formalise this claim by presenting a family of pairs of measurements where the ratio between the discrimination bias of the measurement discrimination task with and without post-measurement states can be arbitrarily large. This shows that, while the post-measurement state was neglected in most of the previous literature, its use can significantly improve the performance of quantum measurement discrimination.
The quantification of the quantumness of a quantum ensemble has theoretical and practical significance in quantum information theory. We propose herein a class of measures of the quantumness of quantum ensembles using the unitary similarity invariant norms of the commutators of the constituent density operators of an ensemble. Rigorous proof shows that they share desirable properties for a measure of quantumness, such as positivity, unitary invariance, concavity under probabilistic union, convexity under state decomposition, decreasing under coarse graining, and increasing under fine graining. Several specific examples illustrate the applications of these measures of quantumness in studying quantum information.
The notion of measurement is of both foundational and instrumental significance in quantum mechanics, and coherence destroyed by measurements (decoherence) lies at the very heart of quantum to classical transition. Qualitative aspects of this spirit have been widely recognized and analyzed ever since the inception of quantum theory. However, axiomatic and quantitative investigations of coherence are attracting great interest only recently with several figures of merit for coherence introduced [Baumgratz, Cramer, and Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)]. While these resource theoretic approaches have many appealing and intuitive features, they rely crucially on various notions of incoherent operations which are sophisticated, subtle, and not uniquely defined, as have been critically assessed [Chitambar and Gour, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 030401 (2016)]. In this paper, we elaborate on the idea that coherence and quantum uncertainty are dual viewpoints of the same quantum substrate, and address coherence quantification by identifying coherence of a state (with respect to a measurement) with quantum uncertainty of a measurement (with respect to a state). Consequently, coherence measures may be set into correspondence with measures of quantum uncertainty. In particular, we take average quantum Fisher information as a measure of quantum uncertainty, and introduce the corresponding measure of coherence, which is demonstrated to exhibit desirable properties. Implications for interpreting quantum purity as maximal coherence, and quantum discord as minimal coherence, are illustrated.
The pretty good measurement is a fundamental analytical tool in quantum information theory, giving a method for inferring the classical label that identifies a quantum state chosen probabilistically from an ensemble. Identifying and constructing the pretty good measurement for the class of bosonic Gaussian states is of immediate practical relevance in quantum information processing tasks. Holevo recently showed that the pretty good measurement for a bosonic Gaussian ensemble is a bosonic Gaussian measurement that attains the accessible information of the ensemble [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 66(9) (2020) 5634]. In this paper, we provide an alternate proof of Gaussianity of the pretty good measurement for a Gaussian ensemble of multimode bosonic states, with a focus on establishing an explicit and efficiently computable Gaussian description of the measurement. We also compute an explicit form of the mean square error of the pretty good measurement, which is relevant when using it for parameter estimation. Generalizing the pretty good measurement is a quantum instrument, called the pretty good instrument. We prove that the post-measurement state of the pretty good instrument is a faithful Gaussian state if the input state is a faithful Gaussian state whose covariance matrix satisfies a certain condition. Combined with our previous finding for the pretty good measurement and provided that the same condition holds, it follows that the expected output state is a faithful Gaussian state as well. In this case, we compute an explicit Gaussian description of the post-measurement and expected output states. Our findings imply that the pretty good instrument for bosonic Gaussian ensembles is no longer merely an analytical tool, but that it can also be implemented experimentally in quantum optics laboratories.