We propose a definition of externally measurable quantum work in driven systems. Work is given as a quantum observable on a control device which is forcing the system and can be determined without knowledge of the system Hamiltonian $H_\mathcal{S}$. We argue that quantum work fluctuation theorems which rely on the knowledge of $H_\mathcal{S}$ are of little practical relevance, contrary to their classical counterparts. Using our framework, we derive a fluctuation theorem which is operationally accessible and could in principle be implemented in experiments to determine bounds on free energy differences of unknown systems.
The concept of intrinsic and operational observables in quantum mechanics is introduced. In any realistic description of a quantum measurement that includes a macroscopic detecting device, it is possible to construct from the statistics of the recorded raw data a set of operational quantities that correspond to the intrinsic quantum mechanical observable.
The concept of intrinsic and operational observables in quantum mechanics is introduced. It is argued that, in any realistic description of a quantum measurement that includes a detecting device, it is possible to construct from the statistics of the recorded raw data a set of operational quantities that correspond to the intrinsic quantum mechanical observable. Using the concept of the propensity and the associated operational positive operator valued measure (POVM) a general description of the operational algebra of quantum mechanical observables is derived for a wide class of realistic dete…
Uncertainty relations are often considered to be a measure of incompatibility of noncommuting observables. However, such a consideration is not valid in general, motivating the need for an alternate measure that applies to any set of noncommuting observables. We present an operational approach to quantifying incompatibility without invoking uncertainty relations. Our measure aims to capture the incompatibility of noncommuting observables as manifest in the non-orthogonality of their eigenstates. We prove that this measure has all the desired properties: it is zero when the observables commute,…
We define what it means for a state in a convex cone of states on a space of observables to be generalized-entangled relative to a subspace of the observables, in a general ordered linear spaces framework for operational theories. This extends the notion of ordinary entanglement in quantum information theory to a much more general framework. Some important special cases are described, in which the distinguished observables are subspaces of the observables of a quantum system, leading to results like the identification of generalized unentangled states with Lie-group-theoretic coherent states w…
Quantum mechanics predicts the joint probability distribution of the outcomes of simultaneous measurements of commuting observables, but, in the state of the art, has lacked the operational definition of simultaneous measurements. The question is answered as to when the consecutive applications of measuring apparatuses give a simultaneous measurement of their observables. For this purpose, all the possible state reductions caused by measurements of an observable is also characterized by their operations.
Joint, or simultaneous, measurements of non-commuting observables are possible within quantum mechanics, if one accepts an increase in the variances of the jointly measured observables. In this paper, we discuss joint measurements of a spin 1/2 particle along any two directions. Starting from an operational locality principle, it is shown how to obtain a bound on how sharp the joint measurement can be. We give a direct interpretation of this bound in terms of an uncertainty relation.
An operational approach to quantum state reduction, the state change of the measured system caused by a measurement of an observable conditional upon the outcome of measurement, is founded without assuming the projection postulate in any stages of the measuring process. Whereas the conventional formula assumes that the probe measurement satisfies the projection postulate, a new formula for determining the state reduction shows that the state reduction does not depend on how the probe observable is measured, or in particular does not depend on whether the probe measurement satisfies the project…
We characterize all position and momentum observables on R and on R^3. We study some of their operational properties and discuss their covariant joint observables.
The so-called preparation uncertainty can be understood in purely operational terms. Namely, it occurs when for some pair of observables, there is no preparation, for which they both exhibit deterministic statistics. However, the right-hand side of uncertainty relation is generally not operational as it depends on the quantum formalism. Also, while joint non-measurability of observables is an operational notion, the complementarity in Bohr sense (i.e. excess of information needed to describe the system) has not yet been expressed in purely operational terms. In this paper we propose a solution…
We show that different entropic measures of fluctuations lead to contradictory uncertainty relations for two complementary observables. We apply Tsallis and Rényi entropies to the joint distribution emerging from a noisy simultaneous measurement of both observables as well as to the product of their individual statistics, either intrinsic or of operational origin.
In quantum logic there is well-known arbitrariness in choosing a binary operation for conditional. Currently, we have at least three candidates, called the Sasaki conditional, the contrapositive Sasaki conditional, and the relevance conditional. A fundamental problem is to show how the form of the conditional follows from an analysis of operational concepts in quantum theory. Here, we attempt such an analysis through quantum set theory (QST). In this paper, we develop quantum set theory based on quantum logics with those three conditionals, each of which defines different quantum logical truth…
We study two operational approaches to quantifying incompatibility that depart significantly from the well known entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) formalism. Both approaches result in incompatibility measures that yield non-zero values even when the pair of incompatible observables commute over a subspace, unlike EURs which give a zero lower bound in such cases. Here, we explicitly show how these measures go beyond EURs in quantifying incompatibility: For any set of quantum observables, we show that both incompatibility measures are bounded from below by the corresponding EURs for the Tsalli…
We introduce an operational interpretation for pure-state global multipartite entanglement based on quantum estimation. We show that the estimation of the strength of low-noise locally depolarizing channels, as quantified by the regularized quantum Fisher information, is directly related to the Meyer-Wallach multipartite entanglement measure. Using channels that depolarize across different partitions, we obtain related multipartite entanglement measures. We show that this measure is the sum of expectation values of local observables on two copies of the state.
To quantify single mode nonclassicality, we start from an operational approach. A positive semi-definite observable is introduced to describe a measurement setup. The quantification is based on the negativity of the normally ordered version of this observable. Perfect operational quantumness corresponds to the quantum-noise-free measurement of the chosen observable. Surprisingly, even moderately squeezed states may exhibit perfect quantumness for a properly designed measurement. The quantification is also considered from an axiomatic viewpoint, based on the algebraic structure of the quantum s…
The eight-port homodyne detection apparatus is analyzed in the framework of the operational theory of quantum measurement. For an arbitrary quantum noise leaking through the unused port of the beam splitter, the positive operator valued measure and the corresponding operational homodyne observables are derived. It is shown that such an eight-port homodyne device can be used to construct the operational quantum trigonometry of an optical field. The quantum trigonometry and the corresponding phase space Wigner functions are derived for a signal field probed by a classical local oscillator and a …
Quantifying coherence is an essential endeavour for both quantum foundations and quantum technologies. Here the robustness of coherence is defined and proven a full monotone in the context of the recently introduced resource theories of quantum coherence. The measure is shown to be observable, as it can be recast as the expectation value of a coherence witness operator for any quantum state. The robustness of coherence is evaluated analytically on relevant classes of states, and an efficient semidefinite program that computes it on general states is given. An operational interpretation is fina…
A universal formulation of the quantum uncertainty regarding quantum indeterminacy, quantum measurement, and its inevitable observer effect is presented with additional focus on the representability of quantum observables over a given state. The operational tangibility of the framework assures that the resultant general relations admit natural operational interpretations and characterisations, and thereby perhaps most importantly, their experimental verifiability. In view of the universal formulation, Heisenberg's original philosophy of the uncertainty principle, most typically exemplified in …
An Operational Resolution of the Third-Particle Paradox
Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information - Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences（奥地利科学院维也纳量子光学与量子信息研究所）；Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna（维也纳大学物理学院）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）
We will discuss the generalization of entropic uncertainty principles in terms of a game. The game involves k-players, each measuring one of k possible observables. The question is, what is the maximum number of players that can play such that their joint entropic uncertainties are tightened by the presence of non-classical correlations? We answer this question and relate it to the ratio of quantum mutual information to classical correlations. This game hence serves to construct an operational interpretation of the aforementioned ratio. It provides another example of quantum correlations provi…
The existence of a real linear-space structure on the set of observables of a quantum system -- i.e., the requirement that the linear combination of two generally non-commuting observables $A,B$ is an observable as well -- is a fundamental postulate of the quantum theory yet before introducing any structure of algebra. However, it is by no means clear how to choose the measuring instrument of the composed observable $aA+bB$ ($a,b\in \mathbb{R}$) if such measuring instruments are given for the addends observables $A$ and $B$ when they are incompatible observables. A mathematical version of this…
It is argued that the partition of a quantum system into subsystems is dictated by the set of operationally accessible interactions and measurements. The emergence of a multi-partite tensor product structure of the state-space and the associated notion of quantum entanglement are then relative and observable-induced. We develop a general algebraic framework aimed to formalize this concept. We discuss several cases relevant to quantum information processing and decoherence control.
We consider a number of aspects of the problem of defining time observables in quantum theory. Time observables are interesting quantities in quantum theory because they often cannot be associated with self-adjoint operators. Their definition therefore touches on foundational issues in quantum theory. Various operational approaches to defining time observables have been proposed in the past. Two of the most common are those based on pulsed measurements in the form of strings of projection operators and continuous measurements in the form of complex potentials. One of the major achievements of …
We show how to construct general probabilistic theories that contain an energy observable dependent on position and momentum. The construction is in accordance with classical and quantum theory and allows for physical predictions, such as the probability distribution for position, momentum and energy. We demonstrate the construction by formulating a toy model for the harmonic oscillator that is neither classical nor quantum. The model features a discrete energy spectrum, a ground state with sharp position and momentum, an eigenstate with non-positive Wigner function as well as a state that has…
We discuss a balanced homodyne detection scheme with imperfect detectors in the framework of the operational approach to quantum measurement. We show that a realistic homodyne measurement is described by a family of operational observables that depends on the experimental setup, rather than a single field quadrature operator. We find an explicit form of this family, which fully characterizes the experimental device and is independent of a specific state of the measured system. We also derive operational homodyne observables for the setup with a random phase, which has been recently applied in …
In early days of quantum theory it was believed that the results of measurements performed on two distant physical systems should be uncorrelated thus their quantum state should be separable it means described by a simple tensor product of the individual local state vectors or a tensor product of individual local density operators. It was shown many years ago by EPR that two systems which interacted in the past and separated afterwards had to be described in most cases by particular non-separable states which are called entangled. It was noticed by Zanardi et al. that a Hilbert space of possib…
As increasingly impressive quantum information processors are realized in laboratories around the world, robust and reliable characterization of these devices is now more urgent than ever. These diagnostics can take many forms, but one of the most popular categories is tomography, where an underlying parameterized model is proposed for a device and inferred by experiments. Here, we introduce and implement efficient operational tomography, which uses experimental observables as these model parameters. This addresses a problem of ambiguity in representation that arises in current tomographic app…
Weak values are the fundamental values for observables in a pre- and post-selected system. Weak values are typically measured by weak measurement, in which weak values appear in the change of not the pre- and post-selected system but the probe system. This indirect characteristic of weak measurement obscures the meaning of weak values for the pre- and post-selected system, in contrast to conventional physical quantities, which have a clear operational meaning. In this study, we operationally formulate weak values as the sensitivity of post-selection probability amplitude to small transformatio…
Three notions of complementarity - operational, probabilistic, and value complementarity - are reanalysed with respect to the question of joint measurements and compared with reference to some examples of canonically conjugate observables. It is shown that the joint measurability of noncommuting observables is a consequence of the quantum formalism if unsharp observables are taken into account; a fact not in conflict with the idea of complementarity, which, in its strongest version, was originally formulated only for sharp observables. As an illustration of the general theory, the wave-particl…
In this paper we consider quantum resources required to maximize the mean values of any nontrivial quantum observable. We show that the task of maximizing the mean value of an observable is equivalent to maximizing some form of coherence, up to the application of an incoherent operation. As such, for any nontrivial observable, there exists a set of preferred basis states where the superposition between such states is always useful for optimizing a quantum observable. The usefulness of such states is expressed in terms of an infinitely large family of valid coherence measures which is then show…
The notions of error and disturbance appearing in quantum uncertainty relations are often quantified by the discrepancy of a physical quantity from its ideal value. However, these real and ideal values are not the outcomes of simultaneous measurements, and comparing the values of unmeasured observables is not necessarily meaningful according to quantum theory. To overcome these conceptual difficulties, we take a different approach and define error and disturbance in an operational manner. In particular, we formulate both in terms of the probability that one can successfully distinguish the act…
Unlike the real part of the generalized weak value of an observable, which can in a restricted sense be operationally interpreted as an idealized conditioned average of that observable in the limit of zero measurement disturbance, the imaginary part of the generalized weak value does not provide information pertaining to the observable being measured. What it does provide is direct information about how the initial state would be unitarily disturbed by the observable operator. Specifically, we provide an operational interpretation for the imaginary part of the generalized weak value as the log…
We review the notion of complementarity of observables in quantum mechanics, as formulated and studied by Paul Busch and his colleagues over the years. In addition, we provide further clarification on the operational meaning of the concept, and present several characterisations of complementarity - some of which new - in a unified manner, as a consequence of a basic factorisation lemma for quantum effects. We work out several applications, including the canonical cases of position-momentum, position-energy, number-phase, as well as periodic observables relevant to spatial interferometry. We cl…
We argue for an operational requirement that all state-dependent measures of disturbance should satisfy. Motivated by this natural criterion, we prove that in any $d$-dimensional Hilbert space and for any pair of non-commuting operators, $A$ and $B$, there exists a set of at least $2^{d-1}$ zero-noise, zero-disturbance (ZNZD) states, for which the first observable can be measured without noise and the second will not be disturbed. Moreover, we show that it is possible to construct such ZNZD states for which the expectation value of the commutator $[A,B]$ does not vanish. Therefore any state-de…
PT-symmetric quantum theory was originally proposed with the aim of extending standard quantum theory by relaxing the Hermiticity constraint on Hamiltonians. However, no such extension has been formulated that consistently describes states, transformations, measurements and composition, which is a requirement for any physical theory. We aim to answer the question of whether a consistent physical theory with PT-symmetric observables extends standard quantum theory. We answer this question within the framework of general probabilistic theories, which is the most general framework for physical th…
A universal formulation of uncertainty relations for quantum measurements is presented with additional focus on the representability of quantum observables by classical observables over a given state. Owing to the simplicity and operational tangibility of the framework, the resultant general relations admit natural operational interpretations and characterisations, and are thus also experimentally verifiable. In view of the universal formulation, Heisenberg's philosophy of the uncertainty principle is also revisited; it is reformulated and restated as a refined no-go theorem, albeit perhaps in…
The existence of noncompatible observables in quantum theory makes a direct operational interpretation of two-point correlation functions problematic. Here we challenge such a view by explicitly constructing a measuring scheme that, independently of the input state $ρ$ and observables $A$ and $B$, performs an unbiased optimal estimation of the two-point correlation function $\operatorname{Tr}[A \ ρ\ B]$. This shows that, also in quantum theory, two-point correlation functions are as operational as any other expectation value. A very simple probabilistic implementation of our proposal is presen…
Quantum mechanics predicts the joint probability distributions of the outcomes of simultaneous measurements of commuting observables, but the current formulation lacks the operational definition of simultaneous measurements. In order to provide foundations of joint statistics of local general measurements on entangled systems in a general theoretical framework, the question is answered as to under what condition the outputs of two measuring apparatuses satisfy the joint probability formula for simultaneous measurements of their observables. For this purpose, all the possible state changes caus…
The existence of incompatibility is one of the most fundamental features of quantum theory, and can be found at the core of many of the theory's distinguishing features, such as Bell inequality violations and the no-broadcasting theorem. A scheme for obtaining new observables from existing ones via classical operations, the so-called simulation of observables, has led to an extension of the notion of compatibility for measurements. We consider the simulation of observables within the operational framework of general probabilistic theories and introduce the concept of simulation irreducibility.…
This talk is a survey of the question of joint measurability of coexistent observables and its is based on the monograph Operational Quantum Physics [1] and on the papers [2,3,4].
It is not possible to obtain information about the observable properties of a quantum system without a physical interaction between the system and an external meter. This physical interaction is described by a unitary transformation of the joint quantum state of the system and the meter, which means that the information transfer from the system to the meter depends on the initial quantum coherence of the meter. In the present paper, we analyze the measurement interaction in terms of the changes of the meter state caused by the interaction with the system. The sensitivity of the meter can then …
The determination of a quantum observable from the first and second moments of its measurement outcome statistics is investigated. Operational conditions for the moments of a probability measure are given which suffice to determine the probability measure. Differential operators are shown to lead to physically relevant cases where the expectation values of large classes of noncommuting observables do not distinguish superpositions of states and, in particular, where the full moment information does not determine the probability measure.
The diverse range of resources which underlie the utility of quantum states in practical tasks motivates the development of universally applicable methods to measure and compare resources of different types. However, many of such approaches were hitherto limited to the finite-dimensional setting or were not connected with operational tasks. We overcome this by introducing a general method of quantifying resources for continuous-variable quantum systems based on the robustness measure, applicable to a plethora of physically relevant resources such as optical nonclassicality, entanglement, genui…
General Probabilistic Theories provide the most general mathematical framework for the theory of probability in an operationally natural manner, and generalize classical and quantum theories. In this article, we study state-discrimination problems in general probabilistic theories using a Bayesian strategy. After re-formulation of the theories with mathematical rigor, we first prove that an optimal observable to discriminate any (finite) number of states always exists in the most general setting. Next, we revisit our recently proposed geometric approach for the problem and show that, for two-s…
Quantum Fisher information places the fundamental limit to the accuracy of estimating an unknown parameter. Here we shall provide the quantum Fisher information an operational meaning: a mixed state can be so prepared that a given observable has the minimal averaged variance, which equals exactly to the quantum Fisher information for estimating an unknown parameter generated by the unitary dynamics with the given observable as Hamiltonian. In particular we shall prove that the quantum Fisher information is the convex roof of the variance, as conjectured by Toth and Petz based on numerical and …
The spin is the prime example of a qubit. Encoding and decoding information in the spin qubit is operationally well defined through the Stern-Gerlach set-up in the non-relativistic (i.e., low velocity) limit. However, an operational definition of the spin in the relativistic regime is missing. The origin of this difficulty lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the spin gets entangled with the momentum in Lorentz-boosted reference frames, and on the other hand, for a particle moving in a superposition of velocities, it is impossible to "jump" to its rest frame, where spin is unambiguously def…
Quantum features of correlated optical modes define a major aspect of the nonclassicality in quantized radiation fields. However, the phase-sensitive detection of a two-mode light field is restricted to interferometric setups and local intensity measurements. Even the full reconstruction of the quantum state of a single radiation mode relies on such detection layouts and the preparation of a well-defined reference light field. In this work, we establish the notion of the essential quantum correlations of two-mode light fields. It refers to those quantum correlations which are measurable by a g…
We demonstrate that quantum instruments can provide a unified operational foundation for quantum theory. Since these instruments directly correspond to laboratory devices, this foundation provides an alternate, more experimentally grounded, perspective from which to understand the elements of the traditional approach. We first show that in principle all measurable probabilities and correlations can be expressed entirely in terms of quantum instruments without the need for conventional quantum states or observables. We then show how these states and observables reappear as derived quantities by…
