A Measurement

Devon Bowen

Ellen B. Stechel

A quantum ergodic theory for finite systems (such as isolated molecules) is developed by introducing the concept of a quantum measure algebra. The basic concept in classical ergodic theory is that of a measure space. A measure space is a set M, together with a specified sigma algebra of subsets in M and a measure defined on that algebra. A sigma algebra is closed under the formation of intersections and symmetric differences. A measure is a nonnegative and countably additive set function. For this to be further classified as a dynamical system, a measurable transformation is introduced. A measurable transformation is a mapping from a measure space into a measure space, such that the inverse image of every measurable set is measurable. In conservative dynamical systems, a measurable transformation is measure preserving, which is to say that the inverse image of every measurable set has the same measure as the original set. Once the measure space and the measurable transformation are defined, ergodic theory can be investigated on three levels—describable as analytic, geometric and algebraic. The analytic level studies linear operators induced by a transformation. The geometric level is concerned directly with transformations on a measure space and the algebraic treatments substitute a measure algebra for the measure space and basically equate sets that differ only by sets of measure zero. It is this latter approach that is most directly paralleled here. A measure algebra for a quantum dynamical system is defined within which stochastic concepts in quantum mechanics can be investigated. The quantum measure algebra differs from a normal measure algebra only in that multiplication is noncommutative and addition is nonassociative. Nonetheless, the quantum measure algebra preserves the essence of a normal measure algebra.

Teiko Heinosaari, Mário Ziman

Until now we have treated measurement apparatuses as devices taking quantum systems as their inputs and producing measurement outcomes as outputs. At this level of description, measurement apparatuses are fully described by observables, as discussed in Chapter 3. The measurement outcome distribution is determined by the particular input state and the observable describing the measurement device. In this chapter we explore a mathematical framework suitable for the description of measurement apparatuses for which, in addition to the measurement outcomes, the measured systems are available after the measurement is performed. In such cases we may try to obtain more information on the system by measuring some other observable, or, perhaps by filtering out some preferred output states we may use our measurement apparatus as a preparator. Clearly, in this kind of situation we need a description of measurement apparatuses that is more detailed than that of observables. Therefore, two more refined concepts, measurement models and instruments , will be investigated in this chapter. There is no customary name for a measurement model. As used here, it was first formalized in a general way by Ozawa [106], [107] who referred to the measurement process . A comprehensive general reference on quantum measurements is the monograph by Busch et al. [35], where measurement models are called premeasurements . Some other authors use the term indirect measurements . Three levels of description of measurements It is convenient to think of three levels of description when considering measurements.

Paul Busch, PEKKA J. LAHTI, Juha-Pekka Pellonpää +1 more

Sébastien Designolle, Máté Farkas, Jędrzej Kaniewski

Abstract In quantum mechanics performing a measurement is an invasive process which generally disturbs the system. Due to this phenomenon, there exist incompatible quantum measurements, i.e. measurements that cannot be simultaneously performed on a single copy of the system. It is then natural to ask what the most incompatible quantum measurements are. To answer this question, several measures have been proposed to quantify how incompatible a set of measurements is, however their properties are not well-understood. In this work, we develop a general framework that encompasses all the commonly used measures of incompatibility based on robustness to noise. Moreover, we propose several conditions that a measure of incompatibility should satisfy, and investigate whether the existing measures comply with them. We find that some of the widely used measures do not fulfil these basic requirements. We also show that when looking for the most incompatible pairs of measurements, we obtain different answers depending on the exact measure. For one of the measures, we analytically prove that projective measurements onto two mutually unbiased bases are among the most incompatible pairs in every dimension. However, for some of the remaining measures we find that some peculiar measurements turn out to be even more incompatible.