Basic quantum information measures involved in the information analysis of quantum systems are considered. It is shown that the main quantum information measurement methods depend on whether the corresponding quantum events are compatible or incompatible. For purely quantum channels, the coherent and compatible information measures, which are qualitatively different, can be distinguished. A general information scheme is proposed for a quantum-physical experiment. In this scheme, informational optimization of an experimental setup is formulated as a mathematical problem.
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.
Every physical measuring needs a finite, different from zero measurement time and provides information in form of the choice of a measurement result from all possible measurement results. If infinitely many (different) measurement results would be possible, the choice of a measurement result could deliver an infinite quantity of information. But the results of physical measurings (of finite duration) never deliver an infinite quantity of information, they describe past, finite reality. Therefore the set of all possible measurement results a priori is finite. In the physical reality only a fini…
We show that given a quantum measurement, for an overwhelming majority of pure states, no meaningful information is produced. This is independent of the number of outcomes of the quantum measurement. Due to conservation inequalities, such random noise cannot be processed into coherent data.
We introduce a hierarchical classification of theories that describe systems with fundamentally limited information content. This property is introduced in an operational way and gives rise to the existence of mutually complementary measurements, i.e. a complete knowledge of future outcome in one measurement is at the expense of complete uncertainty in the others. This is characteristic feature of the theories and they can be ordered according to the number of mutually complementary measurements which is also shown to define their computational abilities. In the theories multipartite states ma…
The physical content of Chern-Simons-action is discussed and it is shown that this action is proportional to the usual charged matter interaction term in electrodynamics.
To explain conceptual gap between classical/quantum and other, hypothetical descriptions of world, several principles has been proposed. So far, all these principles have not explicitly included the uncertainty relation. Here we introduce an information content principle (ICP) which represents the new - constrained uncertainty principle. The principle, by taking into account the encoding/decoding properties of single physical system, is capable of separation both classicality and quanta from a number of potential physical theories including hidden variable theories. The ICP, which is satisfied…
We clarify the microscopic structure of the entangling quantum measurement superoperators and examine their possible physical realization in a simple three-qubit model, which implements the entangling quantum measurement with an arbitrary degree of entanglement.
The fidelity (Shannon mutual information between measurements and physical quantities) is proposed as a quantitative measure of the quality of physical measurements. The fidelity does not depend on the true value of unknown physical quantities (as does the Fisher information) and it allows for the role of prior information in the measurement process. The fidelity is general enough to allow a natural comparison of the quality of classical and quantum measurements. As an example, the fidelity is used to compare the quality of measurements made by a classical and a quantum Mach-Zehnder interferom…
It is shown that within a quantum system, the wave field has a (potential) energy content that can be exchanged with quantum particles. Energy conservation in quantum systems holds if potential energy is correctly taken to be a field attribute. From this perspective, a transfer of energy occurs on measurement from the wave field to a quantum particle and this provides a physical explanation of what is commonly referred to as the collapse of the wavefunction.
What kind of object is a quantum state? Is it an object that encodes an exponentially growing amount of information (in the size of the system) or more akin to a probability distribution? It turns out that these questions are sensitive to what we do with the information. For example, Holevo's bound tells us that n qubits only encode n bits of classical information but for certain communication complexity tasks there is an exponential separation between quantum and classical resources. Instead of just contrasting quantum and classical physics, we can place both within a broad landscape of physi…
In this mainly pedagogical article, we discuss under what circumstances measurements play a special role in quantum processes. In particular we discuss the following facts which appear to be a common area of confusion: i) from a fundamental point of view measurements play no special role whatsoever: all dynamics that can be generated by measurements can be generated by unitary processes (for which post-selection is no exception), ii) from a purely physical point of view, measurements are not "outside" of quantum mechanics, iii) the only difference between the abilities of measurement-based pro…
Kent [quant-ph/9906006] has constructed a hidden variable theory by taking the finite precision of physical measurements into account. But its claim to noncontextuality has been queried, and it shown here that there is a particularly simple way of seeing why it cannot be noncontextual.
A quantum measurement is logically reversible if the premeasurement density operator of the measured system can be calculated from the postmeasurement density operator and from the outcome of the measurement. This paper analyzes why many quantum measurements are logically irreversible, shows how to make them logically reversible, and discusses reversing measurement that returns the postmeasurement state to the premeasurement state by another measurement (physical reversibility). Reversing measurement and unitarily reversible quantum operation are compared from the viewpoint of error correction…
In measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC), a special highly-entangled state (called a resource state) allows for universal quantum computation driven by single-qubit measurements and post-measurement corrections. Physical realisations of this model have been achieved in various physical systems for low numbers of qubits. The large number of qubits necessary to construct the resource state constitutes one of the main down sides to MBQC. However, in some instances it is possible to extend the resource state on the fly, meaning that not every qubit must be realised in the devices simultaneo…
The object of contextuality analysis is a set of random variables each of which is uniquely labeled by a content and a context. In the measurement terminology, the content is that which the random variable measures, whereas the context describes the conditions under which this content is measured (in particular, the set of other contents being measured "together" with this one). Such a set of random variables is deemed noncontextual or contextual depending on whether the distributions of the context-sharing random variables are or are not compatible with certain distributions imposed on the co…
One of the most difficult problems in quantum mechanics is the analysis of the measurement processes. In this paper, we point out that many of these difficulties originate from the different roles of measurement outcomes and observable quantities, which cannot simply be identified with each other. Our analysis shows that the Hilbert space formalism itself describes a fundamental separation between quantitative properties and qualitative outcomes that needs to be taken into account in an objective description of quantum measurements. We derive fundamental relations between the statistics of mea…
We investigate properties of the structural physical approximation (SPA) of the partial transposition map recently introduced by Horodecki and Ekert [quant-ph/0111064]. We focus on the case of two-qubit states and show that in this case the map has the structure of a generalized quantum measurement followed by preparation of a suitable output state. We also introduce SPA for map that transforms two copies of density matrix of a single qubit onto a square of that matrix. We prove that also this map is essentially a generalized quantum measurement.
Kent's conclusion that ``non-contextual hidden variable theories cannot be excluded by theoretical arguments of the Kochen-Specker type once the imprecision in real world experiments is taken into account'' [Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 3755 (1999)], is criticized. The Kochen-Specker theorem just points out that it is impossible even conceive a hidden variable model in which the outcomes of all measurements are pre-determined; it does not matter if these measurements are performed or not, or even if these measurements can be achieved only with finite precision.
Extracting the physical content of Liouvillian eigenmodes: Semiclassical quantization
School of Physical Sciences, National Institute of Science Education and Research（国立科学教育与研究中心物理科学学院）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴巴国立研究所）；Max-Planck-Institut für Physik Komplexer Systeme（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）；Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；Raman Research Institute（拉曼研究所）
General characterization of physical measurements is discussed within the framework of a classical information theory. Uncertainty relation for simultaneous measurements of two physical observables is defined in this framework for generalized dynamic systems controlled under general kinds of equations of motion. We have treated only a mean-square error of the Gauss(-like) distributions in this report. Lessening of the Kennard-Robertson type uncertainties due to boundary conditions are quantitatively discussed using the information entropy.
Using a very simple Gedankenexperiment, I remind the reader that (contrary to what happens in classical mechanics) the energy of a quantum system is inevitably increased just by performing (some) textbook measurements on it. As a direct conclusion, this means that some measurements require the expenditure of a finite amount of energy to be carried out. I also argue that this makes it very difficult to regard measurements as disembodied, immaterial, informational operations, and it forces us to look at them as physical processes just like any other one.
The question of what should be meant by a measurement is tackled from a mathematical perspective whose physical interpretation is that a measurement is a fundamental process via which a finite amount of classical information is produced. This translates into an algebraic and topological definition of measurement space that caters for the distinction between quantum and classical measurements and allows a notion of observer to be derived.
We introduce a self-consistent tomography for arbitrary quantum non-demolition (QND) detectors. Based on this, we build a complete physical characterization of the detector, including the measurement processes and a quantification of the fidelity, ideality, and back-action of the measurement. This framework is a diagnostic tool for the dynamics of QND detectors, allowing us to identify errors, and to improve their calibration and design. We illustrate this on a realistic Jaynes-Cummings simulation of superconducting qubit readout. We characterize non-dispersive errors, quantify the back-action…
