Abstract
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which imposes intrinsic restrictions on our ability to predict the outcomes of incompatible quantum measurements to arbitrary precision, demonstrates one of the key differences between classical and quantum mechanics. The physical systems considered in the uncertainty principle are static in nature and described mathematically with a quantum state in a Hilbert space. However, many physical systems are dynamic in nature and described with the formalism of a quantum channel. In this paper, we show that the uncertainty principle can be reformulated to include process measurements that are performed on quantum channels. Since both the preparation of quantum states and the implementation of quantum measurements are themselves special cases of quantum channels, our formalism encapsulates the uncertainty principle in its utmost generality. More specifically, we obtain expressions that generalize the Maassen–Uffink uncertainty relation and the universal uncertainty relations from quantum states to quantum channels.
- Received 19 April 2020
- Accepted 29 March 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.023077
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society