Measurements in quantum theory exhibit incompatibility, i.e., they can fail to be jointly measurable. An intuitive way to represent the (in)compatibility relations among a set of measurements is via a hypergraph representing their joint measurability structure: its vertices represent measurements and its hyperedges represent (all and only) subsets of compatible measurements. Projective measurements in quantum theory realize (all and only) joint measurability structures that are graphs. On the other hand, general measurements represented by positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) can realize arbitrary joint measurability structures. Here we explore the scope of joint measurability structures realizable with qubit POVMs. We develop a technique that we term marginal surgery to obtain nontrivial joint measurability structures starting from a set of compatible measurements. We show explicit examples of marginal surgery on a special set of qubit POVMs to construct joint measurability structures such as $N$-cycle and $N$-Specker scenarios for any integer $N\geq 3$. We also show the realizability of various joint measurability structures with $N\in\{4,5,6\}$ vertices. In particular, we show that all possible joint measurability structures with $N=4$ vertices are realizable. We conjecture that all joint measurability structures are realizable with qubit POVMs. This contrasts with the unbounded dimension required in R. Kunjwal et al., Phys. Rev. A 89, 052126 (2014). Our results also render this previous construction maximally efficient in terms of the required Hilbert space dimension. We also obtain a sufficient condition for the joint measurability of any set of binary qubit POVMs which powers many of our results and should be of independent interest.
Measurement incompatibility is a distinguishing property of quantum physics and an essential resource for many quantum information processing tasks. We introduce an approach to verify the joint measurability of measurements based on phase-space quasiprobability distributions. Our results therefore establish a connection between two notions of non-classicality, namely the negativity of quasiprobability distributions and measurement incompatibility. We show how our approach can be applied to the study of incompatibility-breaking channels and derive incompatibility-breaking sufficient conditions …
Quantum steering refers to the possibility for Alice to remotely steer Bob's state by performing local measurements on her half of a bipartite system. Two necessary ingredients for steering are entanglement and incompatibility of Alice's measurements. In particular, it has been recently proven that for the case of pure states of maximal Schmidt rank the problem of steerability for Bob's assemblage is equivalent to the problem of joint measurability for Alice's observables. We show that such an equivalence holds in general, namely, the steerability of any assemblage can always be formulated as …
Chained correlation inequalities involving pairwise correlations of qubit observables in the equatorial plane are constructed based on the positivity of a sequence of moment matrices. When a jointly measurable set of fuzzy POVMs is employed in first measurement of every pair of sequential measurements, the chained pairwise correlations do not violate the classical bound imposed by the moment matrix positivity. We identify that incompatibility of measurements is only necessary, but not sufficient, in general, for the violation of the inequality. On the other hand, there exists a one-to-one equi…
We demonstrate that quantum incompatibility can always be detected by means of a state discrimination task with partial intermediate information. This is done by showing that only incompatible measurements allow for an efficient use of premeasurement information in order to improve the probability of guessing the correct state. Thus, the gap between the guessing probabilities with pre- and postmeasurement information is a witness of the incompatibility of a given collection of measurements. We prove that all linear incompatibility witnesses can be implemented as some state discrimination proto…
We study the compatibility (or joint measurability) of quantum observables in a setting where the experimenter has access to multiple copies of a given quantum system, rather than performing the experiments on each individual copy separately. We introduce the index of incompatibility as a quantifier of incompatibility in this multi-copy setting, as well as the notion of compatibility stack representing the various compatibility relations present in a given set of observables. We then prove a general structure theorem for multi-copy joint observables, and use it to prove that all abstract compa…
The fact that there are quantum observables without a simultaneous measurement is one of the fundamental characteristics of quantum mechanics. In this work we expand the concept of joint measurability to all kinds of possible measurement devices, and we call this relation compatibility. Two devices are incompatible if they cannot be implemented as parts of a single measurement setup. We introduce also a more stringent notion of incompatibility, strong incompatibility. Both incompatibility and strong incompatibility are rigorously characterized and their difference is demonstrated by examples.
We discuss the connection between the incompatibility of quantum measurements, as captured by the notion of joint measurability, and the violation of Bell inequalities. Specifically, we present explicitly a given a set of non jointly measurable POVMs $\mathcal{M}_A$ with the following property. Considering a bipartite Bell test where Alice uses $\mathcal{M}_A$, then for any possible shared entangled state $ρ$ and any set of (possibly infinitely many) POVMs $\mathcal{N}_B$ performed by Bob, the resulting statistics admits a local model, and can thus never violate any Bell inequality. This shows…
We consider the question of characterising the incompatibility of sets of high-dimensional quantum measurements. We introduce the concept of measurement incompatibility in subspaces. That is, starting from a set of measurements that is incompatible, one considers the set of measurements obtained by projection onto any strict subspace of fixed dimension. We identify three possible forms of incompatibility in subspaces: (i) incompressible incompatibility: measurements that become compatible in every subspace, (ii) fully compressible incompatibility: measurements that remain incompatible in every…
Quantifying randomness with measurement incompatibility
Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University（瑞典皇家理工学院和斯德哥尔摩大学）；Leibniz Universität Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；University of Jyväskylä（于韦斯屈莱大学）
Some measurements in quantum mechanics disturb each other. This has puzzled physicists since the formulation of the theory, but only in recent decades has the incompatibility of measurements been analyzed in depth and detail, using the notion of joint measurability of generalized measurements. In this Colloquium joint measurability and incompatibility are reviewed from the perspective of quantum information science. The Colloquium starts by discussing the basic definitions and concepts. An overview on applications of incompatibility, such as in measurement uncertainty relations, the characteri…
We introduce a framework for simulating quantum measurements based on classical processing of a set of accessible measurements. Well-known concepts such as joint measurability and projective simulability naturally emerge as particular cases of our framework, but our study also leads to novel results and questions. First, a generalisation of joint measurability is derived, which yields a hierarchy for the incompatibility of sets of measurements. A similar hierarchy is defined based on the number of outcomes used to perform the simulation of a given measurement. This general approach also allows…
The notion of incompatibility of measurements in quantum theory is in stark contrast with the corresponding classical perspective, where all physical observables are jointly measurable. It is of interest to examine if the results of two or more measurements in the quantum scenario can be perceived from a classical point of view or they still exhibit non-classical features. Clearly, commuting observables can be measured jointly using projective measurements and their statistical outcomes can be discerned classically. However, such simple minded association of compatibility of measurements with …
In this work, we investigate the joint measurability of quantum effects and connect it to the study of free spectrahedra. Free spectrahedra typically arise as matricial relaxations of linear matrix inequalities. An example of a free spectrahedron is the matrix diamond, which is a matricial relaxation of the $\ell_1$-ball. We find that joint measurability of binary POVMs is equivalent to the inclusion of the matrix diamond into the free spectrahedron defined by the effects under study. This connection allows us to use results about inclusion constants from free spectrahedra to quantify the degr…
Operational Concealment of Measurement Incompatibility by Quantum Channels: Rank Loss versus Contraction
Jawaharlal Nehru Rajkeeya Mahavidyalaya（贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁国立学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学前沿科学技术研究院）
We demonstrate how quantum optimal control can be used to enhance quantum resources for bipartite one-way protocols, specifically EPR-steering with qubit measurements. Steering is relevant for one-sided device-independent key distribution, the realistic implementations of which necessitate the study of noisy scenarios. So far mainly the case of imperfect detection efficiency has been considered; here we look at the effect of dynamical noise responsible for decoherence and dissipation. In order to set up the optimisation, we map the steering problem into the equivalent joint measurability probl…
