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arXiv:quant-ph/9512023 · Physical Review A

Quantum-state disturbance versus information gain: Uncertainty relations for quantum information

Christopher A. Fuchs, Asher Peres

Published Apr 1, 1996• 361 citations
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Abstract

When an observer wants to identify a quantum state, which is known to be one of a given set of nonorthogonal states, the act of observation causes a disturbance to that state. We investigate the trade-off between the information gain and that disturbance. This issue has important applications in quantum cryptography. The optimal detection method, for a given tolerated disturbance, is explicitly found in the case of two equiprobable nonorthogonal pure states. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.53.2038

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When an observer wants to identify a quantum state, which is known to be one of a given set of nonorthogonal states, the act of observation causes a disturbance to that state. We investigate the trade-off between the information gain and that disturbance. This issue has important applications in quantum cryptography. The optimal detection method, for a given tolerated disturbance, is explicitly found in the case of two equiprobable nonorthogonal pure states. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
The engine that powers quantum cryptography is the principle that there are no physical means for gathering information about the identity of a quantum system's state (when it is known to be prepared in one of a set of nonorthogonal states) without disturbing the system in a statistically detectable way. This situation is often mistakenly described as a consequence of the ``Heisenberg uncertainty principle.'' A more accurate account is that it is a unique feature of quantum phenomena that rests ultimately on the Hilbert space structure of the theory along with the fact that time evolutions for isolated systems are unitary. In this paper we shall explore several aspects of the information--disturbance principle in an attempt to make it firmly quantitative and flesh out its significance for quantum theory as a whole.
The engine that powers quantum cryptography is the principle that there are no physical means for gathering information about the identity of a quantum system's state (when it is known to be prepared in one of a set of nonorthogonal states) without disturbing the system in a statistically detectable way. This situation is often mistakenly described as a consequence of the ``Heisenberg uncertainty principle.'' A more accurate account is that it is a unique feature of quantum phenomena that rests ultimately on the Hilbert space structure of the theory along with the fact that time evolutions for isolated systems are unitary. In this paper I explore several aspects of the ``information / disturbance principle'' in an attempt to make it firmly quantitative for both pure and mixed states. The final section briefly explores the extent to which such a principle can be taken as a foundation for unitary dynamics rather than as a consequence.
The engine that powers quantum cryptography is the principle that there are no physical means for gathering information about the identity of a quantum system's state (when it is known to be prepared in one of a set of nonorthogonal states) without disturbing the system in a statistically detectable way. This situation is often mistakenly described as a consequence of the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” A more accurate account is that it is a unique feature of quantum phenomena that rests ultimately on the Hilbert space structure of the theory along with the fact that time evolutions for isolated systems are unitary. In this paper we shall explore several aspects of the information-disturbance principle in an attempt to make it firmly quantitative and flesh out its significance for quantum theory as a whole.
In 1927, Heisenberg heuristically disclosed the tradeoff between the error in the measurement and the caused disturbance on another complementary observable. In the quantum theory, most of uncertainty relations are proposed to reveal the amount of unavoidable uncertainty in the measuring process. In this paper, we study the error-disturbance relation from the information viewpoint. We ask how much information, rather than how much uncertainty, can be obtained during the two sequential measurements. To achieve optimal information gain, we argue that the strategy for the "intelligent" prior apparatus is to clone the unknown state, and for the posterior one is to perform the swapping operation. We propose the coarse-grained random access code, and therein information causality as a physical principle can be exploited for deriving the upper-bound of information gain. Finally, we conjecture the information gain of measuring the position and momentum of a quantum object in the coarse-grained way.
In this paper, a representation of the information-disturbance theorem based on the quantum Kolmogorov complexity that was defined by P. Vit´anyi has been examined. In the quantum information theory, the information-disturbance relationship, which treats the trade-off relationship between information gain and its caused disturbance, is a fundamental result that is related to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The problem was formulated in a cryptographic setting and the quantitative relationships between complexities have been derived.