Measurement uncertainty relation for three observables

TL;DR

This paper establishes a rigorous measurement uncertainty relation for three qubit observables, providing conditions for saturation, optimal measurements, and analytical incompatibility measures, advancing understanding of quantum incompatibility.

Contribution

It introduces a complete theoretical framework for triplet measurement uncertainty relations, including conditions for saturation and optimal measurements, with analytical incompatibility measures.

Findings

Derived necessary and sufficient conditions for MUR saturation

Proposed a straightforward implementation for optimal joint measurements

Calculated incompatibility measures analytically for symmetric triplets

Abstract

In this work we establish rigorously a measurement uncertainty relation (MUR) for three unbiased qubit observables, which was previously shown to hold true under some presumptions. The triplet MUR states that the uncertainty, which is quantified by the total statistic distance between the target observables and the jointly implemented observables, is lower bounded by an incompatibility measure that reflects the joint measurement conditions. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the triplet MUR to be saturated and the corresponding optimal measurement. To facilitate experimental tests of MURs we propose a straightforward implementation of the optimal joint measurements. The exact values of incompatibility measure are analytically calculated for some symmetric triplets when the corresponding triplet MURs are not saturated. We anticipate that our work may enrich the understanding of quantum incompatibility in terms of MURs and inspire further applications in quantum information science. This work presents a complete theory relevant to a parallel work [Y.-L. Mao, et al., Testing Heisenberg's measurement uncertainty relation of three observables, arXiv:2211.09389] on experimental tests.