We present a universal formulation of uncertainty relation valid for any conceivable quantum measurement and the resultant observation (observer) effect of statistical nature. Owing to its simplicity and operational tangibility, our general relation is also experimentally verifiable. Our relation violates the traditional na{ï}ve bound $\hbar/2$ for the position-momentum measurement while respecting Heisenberg's original philosophy of the uncertainty principle. Our error-disturbance relation admits a parallel formulation to our relation for errors, which also embraces the standard Kennard--Robertson (Schr{ö}dinger) relation as a special case; this attains a unified picture of the three orthodox realms of uncertainty regarding quantum indeterminacy, measurement, and observation effect within a single framework.
Information-theoretic definitions for noise and disturbance in quantum measurements were given in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 050401 (2014) and a state-independent noise-disturbance uncertainty relation was obtained. Here, we derive a tight noise-disturbance uncertainty relation for complementary qubit observables and carry out an experimental test. Successive projective measurements on the neutron's spin-1/2system, together with a correction procedure which reduces the disturbance, are performed. Our experimental results saturate the tight noise-disturbance uncertainty relation for qubits when an o…
It has been shown that Information-Disturbance theorem can play an important role in security proof of quantum cryptography. The theorem is by itself interesting since it can be regarded as an information theoretic version of uncertainty principle. It, however, has been able to treat restricted situations. In this paper, the restriction on the source is abandoned, and a general information-disturbance theorem is obtained. The theorem relates information gain by Eve with information gain by Bob.
We experimentally test the error-disturbance uncertainty relation (EDR) in generalized, strength-variable measurement of a single photon polarization qubit, making use of weak measurement that keeps the initial signal state practically unchanged. We demonstrate that Heisenberg's EDR is violated, yet Ozawa's and Branciard's EDRs are valid throughout the range of our measurement strength.
Uncertainty-disturbance relations and applications
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale（合肥微尺度物质科学国家研究中心）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学物理学院）；Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学量子技术中心）；MajuLab, CNRS-UNS-NUS-NTU International Joint Research Unit（马普-南锡-新国大-南科大国际联合研究实验室）；National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学国立教育学院）；Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学物理系）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学广东省量子科学与工程重点实验室）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）
In this comment we show that the experimental results for a universally valid uncertainty relation in ref.[J. Erhart et al. Nat. Phys.(2012)10.1038/nphys2194]cannot be justified. The experiments cannot be recognized to establish a violation of the Heisenberg-type uncertainty relation suggested by Ozawa[Phys. Lett. A318(2003)21, Phys. Rev. A67(2003)042105].
In quantum theory, measuring process is an important physical process; it is a quantum description of the interaction between the system of interest and the measuring device. Error and disturbance are used to quantitatively check the performance of the measurement, and are defined by using measuring process. Uncertainty relations are a general term for relations that provide constraints on them, and actively studied. However, the true error-disturbance bound for position measurements is not known yet. Here we concretely construct linear position measurements with minimum error-disturbance in e…
When an observer wants to identify a quantum state, which is known to be one of a given set of non-orthogonal states, the act of observation causes a disturbance to that state. We investigate the tradeoff 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 non-orthogonal pure states.
The uncertainty principle generally prohibits determination of certain pairs of quantum mechanical observables with arbitrary precision and forms the basis of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics. It was Heisenberg who used the famous gamma-ray microscope thought experiment to illustrate this indeterminacy. A lower bound was set for the product of the measurement error of an observable and the disturbance caused by the measurement. Later on, the uncertainty relation was reformulated in terms of standard deviations, which focuses solely on indeterminacy of predictions and neglects unavoidable rec…
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation for measurement noise and disturbance states that any position measurement with noise epsilon brings the momentum disturbance not less than hbar/2epsilon. This relation holds only for restricted class of measuring apparatuses. Here, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation is generalized to a relation that holds for all the possible quantum measurements, from which conditions are obtained for measuring apparatuses to satisfy Heisenberg's relation. In particular, every apparatus with the noise and the disturbance statistically independent from the measured object is p…
Information-theoretic uncertainty relations formulate the joint immeasurability of two non-commuting observables in terms of information entropies. The trade-off of the accuracy in the outcome of two successive measurements manifests in entropic noise-disturbance uncertainty relations. Recent theoretical analysis predicts that projective measurements are not optimal, with respect to the noise-disturbance trade-offs. Therefore the results in our previous letter [PRL 115, 030401 (2015)] are outperformed by general quantum measurements. Here, we experimentally test a tight information-theoretic m…
It is generally accepted that the disturbance interpretation cannot explain Heisenberg's uncertainty relation DxDp=h. In this paper a clear distinction will be made between the notions of state preparation and measurement, noting that the disturbance that is referred to in Heisenberg's disturbance interpretation is usually caused by the measurement. The main goal of this paper is to examine and discuss to what extent disturbance during the state preparation plays a role in the interpretation of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. This examination will be done in the context of a single-slit exp…
We examine error-disturbance relations in the quantum measurement of spin systems using an atom-light interface scheme. We model a single spin-1/2 system that interacts with a polarized light meter via a Faraday interaction. We formulate the error and disturbance of the model and examine the uncertainty relations. We found that for the coherent light meter in pure polarization, both the error and disturbance behave the cyclic oscillations due to the Faraday rotation in both the light and spin polarizations. We also examine a class of polarization squeezed light meter, where we apply the phase-…
Uncertainty relation is one of the fundamental principle in quantum mechanics and plays an important role in quantum information science. We experimentally test the error-disturbance uncertainty relation (EDR) with continuous variables for Gaussian states. Two conjugate continuous-variable observables, amplitude and phase quadratures of an optical mode, are measured simultaneously by using a heterodyne measurement system. The EDR with continuous variables for a coherent state, a squeezed state and a thermal state are verified experimentally. Our experimental results demonstrate that Heisenberg…
The uncertainty principle is often interpreted by the tradeoff between the error of a measurement and the consequential disturbance to the followed ones, which originated long ago from Heisenberg himself but now falls into reexamination and even heated debate. Here we show that the tradeoff is switched on or off by the quantum uncertainties of two involved non-commuting observables: if one is more certain than the other, there is no tradeoff; otherwise, they do have tradeoff and the Jensen-Shannon divergence gives it a good characterization.
Finding physical principles lying behind quantum mechanics is essential to understand various quantum features, e.g., the quantum correlations, in a theory-independent manner. Here we propose such a principle, namely, no disturbance without uncertainty, stating that the disturbance caused by a measurement to a subsequent incompatible measurement is no larger than the uncertainty of the first measurement, equipped with suitable theory-independent measures for disturbance and uncertainty. When applied to local systems in a multipartite scenario, our principle imposes such a strong constraint on …
In its original formulation, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle dealt with the relationship between the error of a quantum measurement and the thereby induced disturbance on the measured object. Meanwhile, Heisenberg's heuristic arguments have turned out to be correct only for special cases. A new universally valid relation was derived by Ozawa in 2003. Here, we demonstrate that Ozawa's predictions hold for projective neutron-spin measurements. The experimental inaccessibility of error and disturbance claimed elsewhere has been overcome using a tomographic method. By a systematic variation of …
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the product of the noise in a position measurement and the momentum disturbance caused by that measurement should be no less than the limit set by Planck's constant, hbar/2, as demonstrated by Heisenberg's thought experiment using a gamma-ray microscope. Here I show that this common assumption is false: a universally valid trade-off relation between the noise and the disturbance has an additional correlation term, which is redundant when the intervention brought by the measurement is independent of the measured object, but which allows the noise…
In this comment on the paper by F. Kaneda, S.-Y. Baek, M. Ozawa and K. Edamatsu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 020402, 2014, arXiv:1308.5868], we point out that the claim of having refuted Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation is unfounded since it is based on the choice of unsuitable and operationally problematical quantifications of measurement error and disturbance. As we have shown elsewhere [PRL 111, 160405, 2013], for appropriate choices of operational measures of error and disturbance, Heisenberg's heuristic relation can be turned into a precise inequality which is a rigorous consequence of q…
We demonstrate a fundamental principle of disturbance tradeoff for quantum measurements, along the lines of the celebrated uncertainty principle: The disturbances associated with measurements performed on distinct yet identically prepared ensembles of systems in a pure state cannot all be made arbitrarily small. Indeed, we show that the average of the disturbances associated with a set of projective measurements is strictly greater than zero whenever the associated observables do not have a common eigenvector. For such measurements, we show an equivalence between disturbance tradeoff measured …
In quantum physics, measurement error and disturbance were first naively thought to be simply constrained by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. Later, more rigorous analysis showed that the error and disturbance satisfy more subtle inequalities. Several versions of universally valid error-disturbance relations (EDR) have already been obtained and experimentally verified in the regimes where naive applications of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation failed. However, these EDRs were formulated for discrete measurements. In this paper, we consider continuous measurement processes and obtain new …
In this work we derive a matrix formulation of a noise-disturbance uncertainty relation, which is akin to the Robertson-Schrödinger uncertainty principle. Our inequality is stronger than Ozawa's uncertainty principle and takes noise-disturbance correlations into account. Moreover, we show that, for certain types of measurement interactions, it is covariant with respect to linear symplectic transformations of the noise and disturbance operators.
We analyze in details a conditional measurement scheme based on linear optical components, feed-forward loop and homodyne detection. The scheme may be used to achieve two different tasks. On the one hand it allows the extraction of information with minimum disturbance about a set of coherent states. On the other hand, it represents a nondemolitive measurement scheme for the annihilation operator, i.e. an indirect measurement of the Q-function. We investigate the information/disturbance trade-off for state inference and introduce the estimation/distortion trade-off to assess estimation of the Q…
We employ quantum relative entropy to establish the relation between the measurement uncertainty and its disturbance on a state in the presence (and absence) of quantum memory. For two incompatible observables, we present the measurement-disturbance relation and the disturbance trade-off relation. We find that without quantum memory the disturbance induced by the measurement is never less than the measurement uncertainty and with quantum memory they depend on the conditional entropy of the measured state. We also generalize these relations to the case with multiple measurements. These relation…
It is often said that measuring a system's position must disturb the complementary property, momentum, by some minimum amount due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Using a "weak-measurement", this disturbance can be reduced. One might expect this comes at the cost of also reducing the measurement's precision. However, it was recently demonstrated that a sequence consisting of a weak position measurement followed by a regular momentum measurement can probe a quantum system at a single point, with zero width, in position-momentum space. Here, we study this "joint weak-measurement" and rec…
The uncertainty relation, which displays an elementary property of quantum theory, was originally described by Heisenberg as the relation between error and disturbance. Ozawa presented a more rigorous expression of the uncertainty relation, which was later verified experimentally. Nevertheless, the operators corresponding to error and disturbance should be measurable in the identical state if we follow the presupposition of Heisenberg's thought experiment. In this letter, we discuss simultaneous measurability of error and disturbance and present a new inequality using error and disturbance in …
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 …
Recent theoretical and experimental studies have given raise to new aspects in quantum measurements and error-disturbance uncertainty relations. After a brief review of these issues, we present an experimental test of the error-disturbance uncertainty relations in photon polarization measurement. Using generalized, strength-variable measurement of a single photon polarization state, we experimentally evaluate the error and disturbance in the measurement process and demonstrate the validity of recently proposed uncertainty relations.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is quantified by error-disturbance tradeoff relations, which have been tested experimentally in various scenarios. Here we shall report improved new versions of various error-disturbance tradeoff relations by decomposing the measurement errors into two different components, namely, operator bias and fuzziness. Our improved uncertainty relations reveal the tradeoffs between these two components of errors, and imply various conditionally valid error-tradeoff relations for the unbiased and projective measurements. We also design a quantum circuit to measure the …
It is shown that all the known uncertainty relations are the secondary consequences of Robertson's relation. The basic idea is to use the Heisenberg picture so that the time development of quantum mechanical operators incorporate the effects of the measurement interaction. A suitable use of triangle inequalities then gives rise to various forms of uncertainty relations. The assumptions of unbiased measurement and unbiased disturbance are important to simplify the resulting uncertainty relations and to give the familiar uncertainty relations such as a naive Heisenberg error-disturbance relation…
We revisit the definitions of error and disturbance recently used in error-disturbance inequalities derived by Ozawa and others by expressing them in the reduced system space. The interpretation of the definitions as mean-squared deviations relies on an implicit assumption that is generally incompatible with the Bell-Kochen-Specker-Spekkens contextuality theorems, and which results in averaging the deviations over a non-positive-semidefinite joint quasiprobability distribution. For unbiased measurements, the error admits a concrete interpretation as the dispersion in the estimation of the mean…
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was originally formulated in 1927 as a quantitative relation between the "mean error" of a measurement of one observable and the disturbance thereby caused on another observable. Heisenberg derived this famous relation under an additional assumption on quantum measurements that has been abandoned in the modern theory, and its universal validity was questioned in a debate on the sensitivity limit to gravitational-wave detectors in 1980s. A universally valid form of the error-disturbance relation was shown to be derived in the modern framework of general quantu…
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 appa…
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has been understood to set a limitation on measurements; however, the long-standing mathematical formulation established by Heisenberg, Kennard, and Robertson does not allow such an interpretation. Recently, a new relation was found to give a universally valid relation between noise and disturbance in general quantum measurements, and it has become clear that the new relation plays a role of the first principle to derive various quantum limits on measurement and information processing in a unified treatment. This paper examines the above development on the no…
In Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation for electron position measurement, the measurement error must be the one that determines the uncertainty in the electron position just after the measurement. It is the resolution $ε(x_t)$ i.e., the measurement error of the post-measurement observable $\hat{x}_t$, not the precision $ε(x_0)$ i.e., that of the pre-measurement observable $\hat{x}_0$ that determines the uncertainty of the observable $\hat{x}_t$. Therefore, Heisenberg's relation must be interpreted as one between the resolution $ε(x_t)$ and the disturbance $η(y_0)$. The magnitude of the dis…
The indeterminacy inherent in quantum measurement is an outstanding character of quantum theory, which manifests itself typically in Heisenberg's error-disturbance uncertainty relation. In the last decade, Heisenberg's relation has been generalized to hold for completely general quantum measurements. Nevertheless, the strength of those relations has not been clarified yet for mixed quantum states. Recently, a new error-disturbance uncertainty relation (EDUR), stringent for generalized input states, has been introduced by one of the present authors. A neutron-optical experiment is carried out t…
Heisenberg's reciprocal relation between position measurement error and momentum disturbance is rigorously proven under the assumption that those error and disturbance are independent of the state of the measured object. A generalization of Heisenberg's relation proven valid for arbitrary measurements is proposed and reveals two distinct types of possible violations of Heisenberg's relation.
It has been pointed out that for some types of measurement the Heisenberg uncertainty relation seems to be violated. In order to save the situation a new uncertainty relation was proposed by Ozawa. Here we introduce revised definitions of error and disturbance taking into account the gain associated with generalized measurement interactions. With these new definitions, the validity of the Heisenberg inequality is recovered for continuous linear measurement interactions. We also examine the changes in distribution functions caused by the general measurement interaction and clarify the physical …
While there is a rigorously proven relationship about uncertainties intrinsic to any quantum system, often referred to as "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle," Heisenberg originally formulated his ideas in terms of a relationship between the precision of a measurement and the disturbance it must create. Although this latter relationship is not rigorously proven, it is commonly believed (and taught) as an aspect of the broader uncertainty principle. Here, we experimentally observe a violation of Heisenberg's "measurement-disturbance relationship", using weak measurements to characterize a quant…
In this paper, a representation of the information-disturbance theorem based on the quantum Kolmogorov complexity that was defined by P. Vitanyi 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 quantitative relationships between complexities have been derived.
The Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation is a cornerstone of quantum physics. It was recently shown to be not universally valid and two different approaches to reformulate it were proposed.The first one focuses on how error and disturbance of two observables, A and B, depend on a particular quantum state. The second one asks how a joint measurement of A and B affects their eigenstates. Previous experiments focused on the first approach. Here, we focus on the second one. Firstly, we propose and implement an extendible method for quantum walk-based joint measurements of noisy Pauli operators …
Constructing a set of universal quantum gates is a fundamental task for quantum computation. The existence of noises, disturbances and fluctuations is unavoidable during the process of implementing quantum gates for most practical quantum systems. This paper employs a sampling-based learning method to find robust control pulses for generating a set of universal quantum gates. Numerical results show that the learned robust control fields are insensitive to disturbances, uncertainties and fluctuations during the process of realizing universal quantum gates.
We derive new Heisenberg-type uncertainty relations for both joint measurability and the error-disturbance tradeoff for arbitrary observables of finite-dimensional systems. The relations are formulated in terms of a directly operational quantity, namely the probability of distinguishing the actual operation of a device from its hypothetical ideal, by any possible testing procedure whatsoever. Moreover, they may be directly applied in information processing settings, for example to infer that devices which can faithfully transmit information regarding one observable do not leak any information …
We propose a new scheme to express the uncertainty principle in form of inequality of the bipartite correlation functions for a given multipartite state, which provides an experimentally feasible and model-independent way to verify various uncertainty and measurement disturbance relations. By virtue of this scheme the implementation of experimental measurement on the measurement disturbance relation to a variety of physical systems becomes practical. The inequality in turn also imposes a constraint on the strength of correlation, i.e. it determines the maximum value of the correlation function…
We derive a state dependent error-disturbance trade-off based on a statistical distance in the sequential measurements of a pair of noncommutative observables and experimentally verify the relation with a photonic qubit system. We anticipate that this Letter may further stimulate the study on the quantum uncertainty principle and related applications in quantum measurements.
Tight qubit uncertainty relations studied through weak values in neutron interferometry
Atominstitut, TU Wien（维也纳工业大学原子研究所）；Department of Applied Physics, Hokkaido University（北海道大学应用物理系）；Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University（广岛大学先进理工学研究科）；Institut Laue Langevin（劳厄-朗之万研究所）
It is shown that the well-defined unbiased measurement or disturbance of a dynamical variable is not maintained for the precise measurement of the conjugate variable, independently of uncertainty relations. The conditionally valid uncertainty relations on the basis of those additional assumptions, which include most of the familiar Heisenberg-type relations, thus become singular for the precise measurement. We clarify some contradicting conclusions in the literature concerning those conditionally valid uncertainty relations: The failure of a naive Heisenberg-type error-disturbance relation and…
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…
The uncertainty relation formulated by Heisenberg in 1927 describes a trade-off between the error of a measurement of one observable and the disturbance caused on another complementary observable so that their product should be no less than a limit set by Planck's constant. In 1980, Braginsky, Vorontsov, and Thorne claimed that this relation leads to a sensitivity limit for gravitational wave detectors. However, in 1988 a model of position measurement was constructed that breaks both this limit and Heisenberg's relation. Here, we discuss the problems as to how we reformulate Heisenberg's relat…
We address an information-theoretic approach to noise and disturbance in quantum measurements. Properties of corresponding probability distributions are characterized by means of both the Rényi and Tsallis entropies. Related information-theoretic measures of noise and disturbance are introduced. These definitions are based on the concept of conditional entropy. To motivate introduced measures, some important properties of the conditional Rényi and Tsallis entropies are discussed. There exist several formulations of entropic uncertainty relations for a pair of observables. Trade-off relations f…
The effects of any quantum measurement can be described by a collection of measurement operators {M_m} acting on the quantum state of the measured system. However, the Hilbert space formalism tends to obscure the relationship between the measurement results and the physical properties of the measured system. In this paper, a characterization of measurement operators in terms of measurement resolution and disturbance is developed. It is then possible to formulate uncertainty relations for the measurement process that are valid for arbitrary input states. The motivation of these concepts is expl…
It is found that the measurement disturbance relation (MDR) determines the strength of quantum correlation and hence is one of the essential facets of the nature of quantum nonlocality. In reverse, the exact form of MDR may be ascertained through measuring the correlation function. To this aim, an optical experimental scheme is proposed. Moreover, by virtue of the correlation function, we find that the quantum entanglement, the quantum non-locality, and the uncertainty principle can be explicitly correlated.
A more general measurement disturbance uncertainty principle is presented in a Robertson-Schrödinger formulation. It is shown that it is stronger and having nicer properties than Ozawa's uncertainty relations. In particular is invariant under symplectic transformations. One shows also that there are states of the probe (measuring device) that saturate the matrix formulation of measurement disturbance uncertainty principle.
One of the formulations of Heisenberg uncertainty principle, concerning so-called measurement uncertainty, states that the measurement of one observable modifies the statistics of the other. Here, we derive such a measurement uncertainty principle from two comprehensible assumptions: impossibility of instantaneous messaging at a distance (no-signaling), and violation of Bell inequalities (non-locality). The uncertainty is established for a pair of observables of one of two spatially separated systems that exhibit non-local correlations. To this end, we introduce a gentle form of measurement wh…
