Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-9-2022
Abstract
Uncertainty relations express limits on the extent to which the outcomes of distinct measurements on a single state can be made jointly predictable. The existence of nontrivial uncertainty relations in quantum theory is generally considered to be a way in which it entails a departure from the classical worldview. However, this perspective is undermined by the fact that there exist operational theories which exhibit nontrivial uncertainty relations but which are consistent with the classical worldview insofar as they admit of a generalized-noncontextual ontological model. This prompts the question of what aspects of uncertainty relations, if any, cannot be realized in this way and so constitute evidence of genuine nonclassicality. We here consider uncertainty relations describing the tradeoff between the predictability of a pair of binary-outcome measurements (e.g., measurements of Pauli X and Pauli Z observables in quantum theory). We show that, for a class of theories satisfying a particular symmetry property, the functional form of this predictability tradeoff is constrained by noncontextuality to be below a linear curve. Because qubit quantum theory has the relevant symmetry property, the fact that its predictability tradeoff describes a section of a circle is a violation of this noncontextual bound, and therefore constitutes an example of how the functional form of an uncertainty relation can witness contextuality. We also deduce the implications for a selected group of operational foils to quantum theory and consider the generalization to three measurements.
Recommended Citation
L. Catani, M. Leifer, G. Scala, D. Schmid, and R. W. Spekkens, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 240401 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.240401
The supplemental material contains four sections: I) the main proof of the noncontextual bound, II) an alternative way of obtaining the noncontextuality inequalities, III) the extension of the results to the case of three measurements, IV) the description of the strongest uncertainty relation for a qubit.
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
American Physical Society
Comments
This article was originally published in Physical Review Letters, volume 129, in 2022. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.240401