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arXiv:quant-ph/0112154 · Physical Review Letters

Conservation Laws, Uncertainty Relations, and Quantum Limits of Measurements

Masanao Ozawa

Published Jan 23, 2002• 68 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The uncertainty relation between the noise operator and the conserved quantity leads to a bound on the accuracy of general measurements. The bound extends the assertion by Wigner, Araki, and Yanase that conservation laws limit the accuracy of "repeatable," or "nondisturbing," measurements to general measurements, and improves the one previously obtained by Yanase for spin measurements. The bound represents an obstacle to making a small quantum computer.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.88.050402

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The uncertainty relation between the noise operator and the conserved quantity leads to a bound on the accuracy of general measurements. The bound extends the assertion by Wigner, Araki, and Yanase that conservation laws limit the accuracy of "repeatable," or "nondisturbing," measurements to general measurements, and improves the one previously obtained by Yanase for spin measurements. The bound represents an obstacle to making a small quantum computer.
The Wigner-Araki-Yanase (WAY) theorem shows that additive conservation laws limit the accuracy of measurements. Recently, various quantitative expressions have been found for quantum limits on measurements induced by additive conservation laws, and have been applied to the study of fundamental limits on quantum-information processing. Here, we investigate generalizations of the WAY theorem to multiplicative conservation laws. The WAY theorem is extended to show that an observable not commuting with the modulus of, or equivalently the square of, a multiplicatively conserved quantity cannot be precisely measured. We also obtain a lower bound for the mean-square noise of a measurement in the presence of a multiplicatively conserved quantity. To overcome this noise it is necessary to make large the coefficient of variation (the so-called relative fluctuation), instead of the variance as is the case for additive conservation laws, of the conserved quantity in the apparatus.
The Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem shows that conservation laws limit the accuracy of measurement.Here, we generalize the argument to show that conservation laws limit the accuracy of quantum logic operations.A rigorous lower bound is obtained of the error probability of any physical realization of the controlled-NOT gate under the constraint that the computational basis is represented by a component of spin and that physical implementations obey the angular momentum conservation law.The lower bound is shown to be inversely proportional to the number of ancilla qubits or the strength of the external control field.
Uncertainty relations are one of the fundamental principles in physics. It began as a fundamental limitation in quantum mechanics, and today the word {\it uncertainty relation} is a generic term for various trade-off relations in nature. In this letter, we improve the Kennard-Robertson uncertainty relation, and clarify how much coherence we need to implement quantum measurement under conservation laws. Our approach systematically improves and reproduces the previous various refinements of the Kennard-Robertson inequality. As a direct consequence of our inequalities, we improve a well-known limitation of quantum measurements, the Wigner-Araki-Yanase-Ozawa theorem. This improvement gives an asymptotic equality for the necessary and sufficient amount of coherence to implement a quantum measurement with the desired accuracy under conservation laws.
The notion of quantum instruments is formalized as statistical equivalence classes of all the possible quantum measurements and mathematically characterized as normalized completely positive map valued measures under naturally acceptable axioms. Recently, universally valid uncertainty relations have been established to set a precision limit for any instruments given a disturbance constraint in a form more general than the one originally proposed by Heisenberg. One of them leads to a quantitative generalization of the Wigner–Araki–Yanase theorem on the precision limit of measurements under conservation laws. Applying this, a rigorous lower bound is obtained for the gate error probability of physical implementations of Hadamard gates on a standard qubit of a spin 1/2 system by interactions with control fields or ancilla systems obeying the angular momentum conservation law.
The Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem shows that conservation laws limit the accuracy of measurement. Here, we generalize the argument to show that conservation laws limit the accuracy of quantum logic operations. A rigorous lower bound is obtained of the error probability of any physical realization of the controlled-NOT gate under the constraint that the computational basis is represented by a component of spin, and that physical implementations obey the angular momentum conservation law. The lower bound is shown to be inversely proportional to the number of ancilla qubits or the strength of the external control field.