In this work, we show that very natural, apparently simple problems in quantum measurement theory can be undecidable even if their classical analogues are decidable. Undecidability hence appears as a genuine quantum property here. Formally, an undecidable problem is a decision problem for which one cannot construct a single algorithm that will always provide a correct answer in finite time. The problem we consider is to determine whether sequentially used identical Stern-Gerlach-type measurement devices, giving rise to a tree of possible outcomes, have outcomes that never occur. Finally, we point out implications for measurement-based quantum computing and studies of quantum many-body models and suggest that a plethora of problems may indeed be undecidable.
We establish a connection between measurement-based quantum computation and the field of mathematical logic. We show that the computational power of an important class of quantum states called graph states, representing resources for measurement-based quantum computation, is reflected in the expressive power of (classical) formal logic languages defined on the underlying mathematical graphs. In particular, we show that for all graph state resources which can yield a computational speed-up with respect to classical computation, the underlying graphs--describing the quantum correlations of the s…
A property of a system is called actual, if the observation of the test that pertains to that property, yields an affirmation with certainty. We formalize the act of observation by assuming that the outcome correlates with the state of the observed system and is codified as an actual property of the state of the observer at the end of the measurement interaction. For an actual property, the observed outcome has to affirm that property with certainty, hence in this case the correlation needs to be perfect. A property is called classical if either the property or its negation is actual. It is sh…
Whenever a mathematical proposition to be proved requires more information than it is contained in an axiomatic system, it can neither be proved nor disproved, i.e. it is undecidable, or logically undetermined, within this axiomatic system. I will show that certain mathematical propositions on a d-valent function of a binary argument can be encoded in d-dimensional quantum states of mutually unbiased basis (MUB) sets, and truth values of the propositions can be tested in MUB measurements. I will then show that a proposition is undecidable within the system of axioms encoded in the state, if an…
When one takes into account gravitation, the measurement of space and time cannot be carried out with infinite accuracy. When quantum mechanics is reformulated taking into account this lack of accuracy, the resolution of the measurement problem can be implemented via decoherence without the usual pitfalls. The resulting theory has the same physical predictions of quantum mechanics with a reduction postulate, but is radically different, with the quantum states evolving unitarily in terms of the underlying variables. Gravitation therefore makes this worrisome situation, potentially leading to tw…
In recent papers we put forth a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, colloquially known as ``the Montevideo interpretation''. This interpretation is based on taking into account fundamental limits that gravity imposes on the measurement process. As a consequence one has that situations develop where a reduction process is undecidable from an evolution operator. When such a situation is achieved, an event has taken place. In this paper we sharpen the definition of when and how events occur, more precisely we give sufficient conditions for the occurrence of events. We probe the new definitio…
The phenomenon of nonlocality without entanglement(NLWE) arises in discriminating multi-party quantum separable states. Recently, it has been found that the post-measurement information about the prepared subensemble can lock or unlock NLWE in minimum-error discrimination of non-orthogonal separable states. Thus, it is natural to ask whether the availability of the post-measurement information can influence on the occurrence of NLWE even in other state-discrimination strategies. Here, we show that the post-measurement information can be used to lock as well as unlock the occurrence of NLWE in …
This paper provides a general method for defining a generalized quantum observable (or POVM) that supplies properly normalized conditional probabilities for the time of occurrence (i.e., of detection). This method treats the time of occurrence as a probabilistic variable whose value is to be determined by experiment and predicted by the Born rule. This avoids the problematic assumption that a question about the time at which an event occurs must be answered through instantaneous measurements of a projector by an observer, common to both Rovelli (1998) and Oppenheim et al. (2000). I also addres…
The sensitivity of a repeated measurement-based purification scheme to additional undesired couplings is analyzed, focusing on the very simple and archetypical system consisting of two two-level systems interacting with a repeatedly measured one. Several regimes are considered and in the strong coupling (i.e., when the coupling constant of the undesired interaction is very large) the occurrence of a quantum Zeno effect is proven to dramatically jeopardize the efficiency of the purification process.
Is there any hope for quantum computing to challenge the Turing barrier, i.e. to solve an undecidable problem, to compute an uncomputable function? According to Feynman's '82 argument, the answer is {\it negative}. This paper re-opens the case: we will discuss solutions to a few simple problems which suggest that {\it quantum computing is {\it theoretically} capable of computing uncomputable functions}. In this paper a mathematical quantum "device" (with sensitivity $ε$) is constructed to solve the Halting Problem. The "device" works on a randomly chosen test-vector for $T$ units of time. If t…
We argue that the intractable part of the measurement problem -- the 'big' measurement problem -- is a pseudo-problem that depends for its legitimacy on the acceptance of two dogmas. The first dogma is John Bell's assertion that measurement should never be introduced as a primitive process in a fundamental mechanical theory like classical or quantum mechanics, but should always be open to a complete analysis, in principle, of how the individual outcomes come about dynamically. The second dogma is the view that the quantum state has an ontological significance analogous to the significance of t…
A "continuous measurement" Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) in the context of trapped ions is predicted. We describe the physical system and study its exact time evolution showing the appearance of Zeno Phenomena. New indicators for the occurrence of QZE in oscillatory systems are proposed and carefully discussed.
The measurement of a spin-$\half$ is modeled by coupling it to an apparatus, that consists of an Ising magnetic dot coupled to a phonon bath. Features of quantum measurements are derived from the dynamical solution of the measurement, regarded as a process of quantum statistical mechanics. Schrödinger cat terms involving both the system and the apparatus, die out very quickly, while the registration is a process taking the apparatus from its initially metastable state to one of its stable final states. The occurrence of Born probabilities can be inferred at the macroscopic level, by looking at…
We study a quantum Otto cycle in which the strokes are performed in finite time. The cycle involves energy measurements at the end of each stroke to allow for the respective determination of work. We then optimize for the work and efficiency of the cycle by varying the time spent in the different strokes and find that the optimal value of the ratio of time spent on each stroke goes through sudden changes as the parameters of this cycle vary continuously. The position of these discontinuities depends on the optimized quantity under consideration such as the net work output or the efficiency.
We analyze the possible results of the most general measurement on two copies of a quantum state. We show that $μ$ can label a set of outcomes of such measurement if and only if there is a family of completely co--positive (ccP) maps $C_μ$ such that the probability of occurrence $Prob(μ)$ is the fidelity of the map $C_μ$, i.e. $Prob(μ)= Tr(ρC_μ(ρ))$ which must add up to the fully depolarizing map. This implies that a POVM on two copies induces a measure on the set of ccP maps (i.e., a ccPMVM). We present examples of ccPMVM's and discuss their tomographic applications showing that two copies of…
Phase synchronization was proved to be unbounded in quantum level, but the witness of phase synchronization is always expensive in terms of the quantum resource and non-local measurements involved. Based on the quantum uncertainty relation, we construct two local criterions for the phase synchronization in this paper. The local criterions indicate that the phase synchronization in the quantum level can be witnessed only by the local measurements, and the deduction has been verified in the optomechanics system in numerical way. Besides, by analyzing the physical essence of the phase synchroniza…
Bell's inequalities are defined by sums of correlations involving non-commuting observables in each of the two systems. Violations of Bell's inequalities are only possible because the precision of any joint measurement of these observables will be limited by quantum mechanical uncertainty relations. In this paper we explore the relation between the local measurement uncertainties and the magnitude of the correlations by preparing polarization entangled photon pairs and performing joint measurements of non-commuting polarization components at different uncertainty trade-offs. The change in meas…
The notion of state reduction employed by the standard quantum theory of measurement is difficult to accept for two reasons: It leaves open where and when the reduction takes place and it does not give any objective conditions under which the reduction occurs. Some recently published ideas on this problem are developed an improved. The disturbance of measurement due to identical particles in the environment is shown to make any POV measure non-measurable. Truncated POV (TPOV) measures are introduced that can be measurable if object systems satisfy the additional requirement of having separatio…
We discuss the implications of quantum-classical Yule-Simpson effect for quantum hypothesis testing in the presence of noise, and provide an experimental demonstration of its occurrence in the problem of discriminating which polarization quantum measurement has been actually performed by a detector box designed to measure linear polarization of single-photon states along a fixed but unknown direction.
The so-called Simpson's "paradox", or Yule-Simpson (YS) effect, occurs in classical statistics when the correlations that are present among different sets of samples are reversed if the sets are combined together, thus ignoring one or more lurking variables. Here we illustrate the occurrence of two analogue effects in quantum measurements. The first, which we term quantum-classical YS effect, may occur with quantum limited measurements and with lurking variables coming from the mixing of states, whereas the second, here referred to as quantum-quantum YS effect, may take place when coherent sup…
We present the first experimental confirmation of the quantum-mechanical prediction of stronger-than-binary correlations. These are correlations that cannot be explained under the assumption that the occurrence of a particular outcome of an $n \ge 3$-outcome measurement is due to a two-step process in which, in the first step, some classical mechanism precludes $n-2$ of the outcomes and, in the second step, a binary measurement generates the outcome. Our experiment uses pairs of photonic qutrits distributed between two laboratories, where randomly chosen three-outcome measurements are performe…
Short pulses of a probe laser have been used in the past to measure whether a two-level atom is in its ground or excited state. The probe pulse couples the ground state to a third, auxiliary, level of the atom. Occurrence or absence of resonance fluorescence were taken to mean that the atom was found in its ground or excited state, respectively. In this paper we investigate to what extent this procedure results in an effective measurement to which the projection postulate can be applied, at least approximately. We discuss in detail the complications arising from an additional time development …
Theory of quantum measurements is often classified as decision theory. An event in decision theory corresponds to the measurement of an observable. This analogy looks clear for operationally testable simple events. However, the situation is essentially more complicated in the case of composite events. The most difficult point is the relation between decisions under uncertainty and measurements under uncertainty. We suggest a unified language for describing the processes of quantum decision making and quantum measurements. The notion of quantum measurements under uncertainty is introduced. We s…
We present a scheme able to protect k >= 3 qubits of information against the occurrence of multiple erasures, based on the code proposed by Yang et al. (2004 JETP Letters 79 236). In this scheme redundant blocks are used and we restrict to the case that each erasure must occur in distinct blocks. We explicitly characterize the encoding operation and the restoring operation required to implement this scheme. The operators used in these operations can be adjusted to construct different quantum erasure-correcting codes. A special feature of this scheme is that no measurement is required. To illus…
We study the statistics of energy fluctuations in a three-level quantum system subject to a sequence of projective quantum measurements. We check that, as expected, the quantum Jarzynski equality holds provided that the initial state is thermal. The latter condition is trivially satisfied for two-level systems, while this is generally no longer true for $N$-level systems, with $N > 2$. Focusing on three-level systems, we discuss the occurrence of a unique energy scale factor $β_{\rm eff}$ that formally plays the role of an effective inverse temperature in the Jarzynski equality. To this aim, w…
Two of the most intriguing features of quantum physics are the uncertainty principle and the occurrence of nonlocal correlations. The uncertainty principle states that there exist pairs of incompatible measurements on quantum systems such that their outcomes cannot both be predicted. On the other hand, nonlocal correlations of measurement outcomes at different locations cannot be explained by classical physics, but appear in the presence of entanglement. Here, we show that these two fundamental quantum effects are quantitatively related. Namely, we provide an entropic uncertainty relation for …
Classical models of computation traditionally resort to halting schemes in order to enquire about the state of a computation. In such schemes, a computational process is responsible for signalling an end of a calculation by setting a halt bit, which needs to be systematically checked by an observer. The capacity of quantum computational models to operate on a superposition of states requires an alternative approach. From a quantum perspective, any measurement of an equivalent halt qubit would have the potential to inherently interfere with the computation by provoking a random collapse amongst…
