In the history of quantum mechanics, various types of uncertainty relationships have been introduced to accommodate different operational meanings of Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We derive an optimized entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) that quantifies an amount of quantum uncertainty in the scenario of successive measurements. The EUR characterizes the limitation in the measurability of two different quantities of a quantum state when they are measured through successive measurements. We find that the bound quantifies the information between the two measurements and imposes a condition that is consistent with the recently-derived error-disturbance relationship.
We derive entropic uncertainty relations for successive generalized measurements by using general descriptions of quantum measurement within two {distinctive operational} scenarios. In the first scenario, by merging {two successive measurements} into one we consider successive measurement scheme as a method to perform an overall {composite} measurement. In the second scenario, on the other hand, we consider it as a method to measure a pair of jointly measurable observables by marginalizing over the distribution obtained in this scheme. In the course of this work, we identify that limits on ones ability to measure with low uncertainty via this scheme come from intrinsic unsharpness of observables obtained in each scenario. In particular, for the L{u}ders instrument, disturbance caused by the first measurement to the second one gives rise to the unsharpness at least as much as incompatibility of the observables composing successive measurement.
Quantum uncertainty relations are formulated in terms of relative entropy between distributions of measurement outcomes and suitable reference distributions with maximum entropy. This type of entropic uncertainty relation can be applied directly to observables with either discrete or continuous spectra. We find that a sum of relative entropies is bounded from above in a nontrivial way, which we illustrate with some examples.
We derive new inequalities for the probabilities of projective measurements in mutually unbiased bases of a qudit system. These inequalities lead to wider ranges of validity and tighter bounds on entropic uncertainty inequalities previously derived in the literature.
Entropic uncertainty is a well-known concept to formulate uncertainty relations for continuous variable quantum systems with finitely many degrees of freedom. Typically, the bounds of such relations scale with the number of oscillator modes, preventing a straight-forward generalization to quantum field theories. In this work, we overcome this difficulty by introducing the notion of a functional relative entropy and show that it has a meaningful field theory limit. We present the first entropic uncertainty relation for a scalar quantum field theory and exemplify its behavior by considering few particle excitations and the thermal state. Also, we show that the relation implies the Robertson-Schrodinger uncertainty relation.
We derive an entropic uncertainty relation for generalized positive-operator-valued measure (POVM) measurements via a direct-sum majorization relation using Schur concavity of entropic quantities in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Our approach provides a significant improvement of the uncertainty bound compared with previous majorization-based approaches [S. Friendland, V. Gheorghiu and G. Gour, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 230401 (2013); A. E. Rastegin and K. .Zyczkowski, J. Phys. A, 49, 355301 (2016)], particularly by extending the direct-sum majorization relation first introduced in [L. Rudnicki, Z. Pucha{l}a and K. .{Z}yczkowski, Phys. Rev. A 89, 052115 (2014)]. We illustrate the usefulness of our uncertainty relations by considering a pair of qubit observables in a two-dimensional system and randomly chosen unsharp observables in a three-dimensional system. We also demonstrate that our bound tends to be stronger than the generalized Maassen--Uffink bound with an increase in the unsharpness effect. Furthermore, we extend our approach to the case of multiple POVM measurements, thus making it possible to establish entropic uncertainty relations involving more than two observables.