A survey of recent ideas and goals, along with a brief history behind the quantification of uncertainties and statistical correlation in quantum systems is presented. The focus is on ideas and connections taken from information theory, in particular, the quantification of uncertainties via Shannon entropies, the entropic uncertainty relation, and statistical correlation by mutual information. A discussion of phase-space distributions and their use in information theory is also given. An incomplete list of applications, with emphasis on confined quantum systems, is provided. The article concludes by addressing future challenges in these directions.
A survey of recent ideas and goals, along with a brief history behind the quantification of uncertainties and statistical correlation in quantum systems is presented. The focus is on ideas and connections taken from information theory, in particular, the quantification of uncertainties via Shannon entropies, the entropic uncertainty relation, and statistical correlation by mutual information. A discussion of phase-space distributions and their use in information theory is also given. An incomplete list of applications, with emphasis on confined quantum systems, is provided. The article concludes by addressing future challenges in these directions.
We provide a historical perspective of how the notion of correlations has evolved within quantum physics. We begin by reviewing Shannon's information theory and its first application in quantum physics, due to Everett, in explaining the information conveyed during a quantum measurement. This naturally leads us to Lindblad's information theoretic analysis of quantum measurements and his emphasis of the difference between the classical and quantum mutual information. After briefly summarizing the quantification of entanglement using these ideas, we arrive at the concept of quantum discord, which naturally captures the boundary between entanglement and classical correlations. Finally we discuss possible links between discord, which the generation of correlations in thermodynamic transformations of coupled harmonic oscillators.
Abstract We pedagogically present the information theory as originally established, explaining its essential ideas and paying attention to the expression employed to measure the amount of information. We also discuss relationships between information and quantum theories. In this context we determine the information entropies on the position, S x , and momentum, S p , spaces, in addition to the entropy sum, S t . Here, we use the modified entropic expressions that are dimensionally consistent. We provide original explanations for the behaviors of the S x , S p and S t values analyzing the probability densities and by means of the normalization constants and properties of Fourier transform. We validate the entropic uncertainty relation and inspect the standard deviation and information entropies as measures of quantum uncertainty. The systems of interest are unidimensional one-particle quantum systems in the ground and excited states.
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.
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.
Abstract Besides the well-known Shannon entropy, there is a set of Shannon-like entropies which have applications in statistical and quantum physics. These entropies are functions of certain parameters and converge toward Shannon entropy when these parameters approach the value 1. We describe briefly the most important Shannon-like entropies and present their graphical representations. Their graphs look almost identical, though by superimposing them it appears that they are distinct and characteristic of each Shannon-like entropy. We try to formulate the alternative entropic uncertainty relations by means of the Shannon-like entropies and show that all of them equally well express the uncertainty principle of quantum physics.
Uncertainty principle, which was first introduced by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, forms a fundamental component of quantum mechanics. A graceful aspect of quantum mechanics is that the uncertainty relations between incompatible observables allow for succinct quan- titative formulations of this revolutionary idea: it is impossible to simultaneously measure two complementary variables of a particle in precision. In particular, information theory offers two basic ways to express the Heisenberg’s principle: variance-based uncertainty relations and entropic uncertainty relations. We first investigate the uncertainty relations based on the sum of variances and derive a family of weighted uncertainty relations to provide an optimal lower bound for all situations. Our work indicates that it seems unreasonable to assume a priori that incompatible observables have equal contribution to the variance-based sum form uncertainty relations. We also study the role of mutually exclusive physical states in the recent work and generalize the variance-based uncertainty relations to mutually exclusive uncertainty relations. Next, we develop a new kind of entanglement detection criteria within the framework of marjorization theory and its matrix representation. By virtue of majorization uncertainty bounds, we are able to construct the entanglement criteria which have advantage over the scalar detect- ing algorithms as they are often stronger and tighter. Furthermore, we explore various expression of entropic uncertainty relations, including sum of Shannon entropies, majorization uncer- tainty relations and uncertainty relations in presence of quantum memory. For entropic uncertainty relations without quantum side information, we provide several tighter bounds for multi-measurements, with some of them also valid for Rényi and Tsallis entropies besides the Shannon entropy. We employ majorization theory and actions of the symmetric group to obtain an admixture bound for entropic uncertainty relations with multi-measurements. Comparisons among existing bounds for multi-measurements are also given. However,classical entropic uncertainty relations assume there has only classical side information. For modern uncertainty relations, those who allowed for non-trivial amount of quantum side information, their bounds have been strengthened by our recent result for both two and multi- measurements. Finally, we propose an approach which can extend all uncertainty relations on Shannon entropies to allow for quantum side information and discuss the applications of our entropic framework. Combined with our uniform entanglement frames, it is possible to detect entanglement via entropic uncertainty relations even if there is no quantum side in- formation. With the rising of quantum information theory, uncertainty relations have been established as important tools for a wide range of applications, such as quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, entanglement detection, quantum metrology, quantum speed limit and so on. It is thus necessary to focus on the study of uncertainty relations.