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Acta Physica Sinica

Review on entropic uncertainty relations

Lijuan Li, Fei Ming, Xue‐Ke Song, Liu Ye, Dong Wang

Published Jan 1, 2022• 9 citations

Abstract

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one of the characteristics of quantum mechanics. With the vigorous development of quantum information theory, uncertain relations have gradually played an important role in it. In particular, in order to solved the shortcomings of the concept in the initial formulation of the uncertainty principle, we brought entropy into the uncertainty relation, after that, the entropic uncertainty relation has exploited the advantages to the full in various applications. As we all know the entropic uncertainty relation has became the core element of the security analysis of almost all quantum cryptographic protocols. This review mainly introduces development history and latest progress of uncertain relations. After Heisenberg's argument that incompatible measurement results are impossible to predict, many scholars, inspired by this viewpoint, have made further relevant investigations. They combined the quantum correlation between the observable object and its environment, and carried out various generalizations of the uncertainty relation to obtain more general formulas. In addition, it also focuses on the entropy uncertainty relationship and quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation, and the dynamic characteristics of uncertainty in some physical systems. Finally, various applications of the entropy uncertainty relationship in the field of quantum information are discussed, from randomnesss to wave-particle duality to quantum key distribution.

DOI: 10.7498/aps.71.20212197

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Abstract Uncertainty relations take a crucial and fundamental part in the frame of quantum theory, and are bringing on many marvelous applications in the emerging field of quantum information sciences. Especially, as entropy is imposed into the uncertainty principle, entropy‐based uncertainty relations lead to a number of applications including quantum key distribution, entanglement witness, quantum steering, quantum metrology, and quantum teleportation. Herein, the history of the development of the uncertainty relations is discussed, especially focusing on the recent progress with regard to quantum‐memory‐assisted entropic uncertainty relations and dynamical characteristics of the measured uncertainty in some explicit physical systems. The aims are to help deepen the understanding of entropic uncertainty relations and prompt further explorations for versatile applications of the relations on achieving practical quantum tasks.

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The uncertainty principle is one of the comprehensive and fundamental concept in quantum theory. This principle states that it is not possible to simultaneously measure two incompatible observatories with high accuracy. Uncertainty principle has been formulated in various form. The most famous type of uncertainty relation is expressed based on the standard deviation of observables. In quantum information theory the uncertainty principle can be formulated using Shannon and von Neumann entropy. Entropic uncertainty relation in the presence of quantum memory is one of the most useful entropic uncertainty relations. Due to their importance and scalability, solid state systems have received considerable attention nowadays. In this work we will consider a quantum dot system as a solid state system. We will study the quantum correlation and quantum memory assisted entropic uncertainty in this typ of system. We will show that the temperature in of quantum dot system can affect the quantum correlation and entropic uncertainty bound. It will be observed that the entropic uncertainty bound decreases with decreasing temperature and quantum correlations decreases with increasing the temperature.

Energy-time uncertainty plays an important role in quantum foundations and technologies, and it was even discussed by the founders of quantum mechanics. However, standard approaches (e.g., Robertson's uncertainty relation) do not apply to energy-time uncertainty because, in general, there is no Hermitian operator associated with time. Following previous approaches, we quantify time uncertainty by how well one can read off the time from a quantum clock. We then use entropy to quantify the information-theoretic distinguishability of the various time states of the clock. Our main result is an entropic energy-time uncertainty relation for general time-independent Hamiltonians, stated for both the discrete-time and continuous-time cases. Our uncertainty relation is strong, in the sense that it allows for a quantum memory to help reduce the uncertainty, and this formulation leads us to reinterpret it as a bound on the relative entropy of asymmetry. Because of the operational relevance of entropy, we anticipate that our uncertainty relation will have information-processing applications.

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