No Arabic abstract
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.
When the linear measurements of an instance of low-rank matrix recovery satisfy a restricted isometry property (RIP)---i.e. they are approximately norm-preserving---the problem is known to contain no spurious local minima, so exact recovery is guaranteed. In this paper, we show that moderate RIP is not enough to eliminate spurious local minima, so existing results can only hold for near-perfect RIP. In fact, counterexamples are ubiquitous: we prove that every x is the spurious local minimum of a rank-1 instance of matrix recovery that satisfies RIP. One specific counterexample has RIP constant $delta=1/2$, but causes randomly initialized stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to fail 12% of the time. SGD is frequently able to avoid and escape spurious local minima, but this empirical result shows that it can occasionally be defeated by their existence. Hence, while exact recovery guarantees will likely require a proof of no spurious local minima, arguments based solely on norm preservation will only be applicable to a narrow set of nearly-isotropic instances.
Blockchain is built on a peer-to-peer network that relies on frequent communications among the distributively located nodes. In particular, the consensus mechanisms (CMs), which play a pivotal role in blockchain, are communication resource-demanding and largely determines blockchain security bound and other key performance metrics such as transaction throughput, latency and scalability. Most blockchain systems are designed in a stable wired communication network running in advanced devices under the assumption of sufficient communication resource provision. However, it is envisioned that the majority of the blockchain node peers will be connected through the wireless network in the future. Constrained by the highly dynamic wireless channel and scarce frequency spectrum, communication can significantly affect blockchains key performance metrics. Hence, in this paper, we present wireless blockchain networks (WBN) under various commonly used CMs and we answer the question of how much communication resource is needed to run such a network. We first present the role of communication in the four stages of the blockchain procedure. We then discuss the relationship between the communication resource provision and the WBNs performance, for three of the most used blockchain CMs namely, Proof-of-Work (PoW), practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) and Raft. Finally, we provide analytical and simulated results to show the impact of the communication resource provision on blockchain performance.
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.
One possible explanation for the proton form factor discrepancy is a contribution to the elastic electron-proton cross section from hard two-photon exchange (TPE), a typically neglected radiative correction. Hard TPE cannot be calculated in a model-independent way, but it can be determined experimentally by looking for deviations from unity in the ratio of positron-proton to electron-proton cross sections. Three recent experiments have measured this cross section ratio to quantify hard TPE. To interpret the results of these experiments, it is germane to ask: How large of a deviation from unity is necessary to fully resolve the form factor discrepancy? With a minimal set of assumptions and using global fits to unpolarized and polarized elastic scattering data, I estimate the necessary size of the TPE correction in the kinematics of the three recent experiments and compare to their measurements. I find wide variation when using different global fits, implying that the magnitude of the form factor discrepancy is not well-constrained. The recent hard TPE measurements can easily accommodate the hypothesis that TPE underlies the proton form factor discrepancy.
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.