Abstract
The fundamental principles of complementarity and uncertainty are shown to be related to the possibility of joint unsharp measurements of pairs of noncommuting quantum observables. A joint measurement scheme for complementary observables is proposed. The measured observables are represented as positive operator valued measures (POVMs), whose intrinsic fuzziness parameters are found to satisfy an intriguing pay-off relation reflecting the complementarity. At the same time, this relation represents an instance of a Heisenberg uncertainty relation for measurement imprecisions. A model-independent consideration shows that this uncertainty relation is logically connected with the joint measurability of the POVMs in question.
- Received 18 July 2002
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.68.034102
©2003 American Physical Society