No Arabic abstract
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 subspace, and (iii) partly compressible incompatibility: measurements that are compatible in some subspace and incompatible in another. For each class we discuss explicit examples. Finally, we present some applications of these ideas. First we show that joint measurability and coexistence are two inequivalent notions of incompatibility in the simplest case of qubit systems. Second we highlight the implications of our results for tests of quantum steering.
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 $rho$ 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 that quantum measurement incompatibility does not imply Bell nonlocality in general.
A pair of quantum observables diagonal in the same incoherent basis can be measured jointly, so some coherence is obviously required for measurement incompatibility. Here we first observe that coherence in a single observable is linked to the diagonal elements of any observable jointly measurable with it, leading to a general criterion for the coherence needed for incompatibility. Specialising to the case where the second observable is incoherent (diagonal), we develop a concrete method for solving incompatibility problems, tractable even in large systems by analytical bounds, without resorting to numerical optimisation. We verify the consistency of our method by a quick proof of the known noise bound for mutually unbiased bases, and apply it to study emergent classicality in the spin-boson model of an N-qubit open quantum system. Finally, we formulate our theory in an operational resource-theoretic setting involving genuinely incoherent operations used previously in the literature, and show that if the coherence is insufficient to sustain incompatibility, the associated joint measurements have sequential implementations via incoherent instruments.
Incompatible measurements, i.e., measurements that cannot be simultaneously performed, are necessary to observe nonlocal correlations. It is natural to ask, e.g., how incompatible the measurements have to be to achieve a certain violation of a Bell inequality. In this work, we provide the direct link between Bell nonlocality and the quantification of measurement incompatibility. This includes quantifiers for both incompatible and genuine-multipartite incompatible measurements. Our method straightforwardly generalizes to include constraints on the systems dimension (semi-device-independent approach) and on projective measurements, providing improved bounds on incompatibility quantifiers, and to include the prepare-and-measure scenario.
One of the basic distinctions between classical and quantum mechanics is the existence of fundamentally incompatible quantities. Such quantities are present on all levels of quantum objects: states, measurements, quantum channels, and even higher order dynamics. In this manuscript, we show that two seemingly different aspects of quantum incompatibility: the quantum marginal problem of states and the incompatibility on the level of quantum channels are in many-to-one correspondence. Importantly, as incompatibility of measurements is a special case of the latter, it also forms an instance of the quantum marginal problem. The generality of the connection is harnessed by solving the marginal problem for Gaussian and Bell diagonal states, as well as for pure states under depolarizing noise. Furthermore, we derive entropic criteria for channel compatibility, and develop a converging hierarchy of semi-definite programs for quantifying the strength of quantum memories.
In contrast with classical physics, in quantum physics some sets of measurements are incompatible in the sense that they can not be performed simultaneously. Among other applications, incompatibility allows for contextuality and Bell nonlocality. This makes of crucial importance developing tools for certifying whether a set of measurements posses a certain structure of incompatibility. Here we show that, for quantum or nonsignaling models, if the measurements employed in a Bell test satisfy a given type of compatibility, then the amount of violation of some specific Bell inequalities become limited. Then, we show that correlations arising from local measurements on two-qubit states violate these limits, which rules out in a device-independent way such structures of incompatibility. In particular, we prove that quantum correlations allow for a device-independent demonstration of genuine triplewise incompatibility. Finally, we translate these results into a semi-device-independent Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-steering scenario.