Entropic uncertainty relations—a survey

The uncertainty principle provides a nontrivial bound to expose the precision for the outcome of the measurement on a pair of incompatible observables in a quantum system. Therefore, it is of essential importance for quantum precision measurement in the area of quantum information processing. Herein, we investigate quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation (QMA-EUR) in a two-qubit Heisenberg spin chain. Specifically, we observe the dynamics of QMA-EUR in a realistic model there are two correlated sites linked by a thermal entanglement in the spin chain with an inhomogeneous magnetic field. It turns out that the temperature, the external inhomogeneous magnetic field and the field inhomogeneity can lift the uncertainty of the measurement due to the reduction of the thermal entanglement, and explicitly higher temperature, stronger magnetic field or larger inhomogeneity of the field can result in inflation of the uncertainty. Besides, it is found that there exists distinct dynamical behaviors of the uncertainty for ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism chains. Moreover, we also verify that the measuring uncertainty is dramatically anti-correlated with the purity of the bipartite spin system, the greater purity can result in the reduction of the measuring uncertainty, vice versa. Therefore, our observations might provide a better understanding of the dynamics of the entropic uncertainty in the Heisenberg spin chain, and thus shed light on quantum precision measurement in the framework of versatile systems, particularly solid states.

In this paper, we investigate the tightness of entropic uncertainty relation in the absence (presence) of the quantum memory which the memory particle being weakly coupled to a decohering Davies-type Markovian environment. The results show that the tightness of the quantum uncertainty relation can be controlled by the energy relaxation time F, the dephasing time G and the rescaled temperature p, the perfect tightness can be arrived by dephasing and energy relaxation satisfying F = 2G and p = 1/2. In addition, the tightness of the memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation and the entropic uncertainty relation can be influenced mainly by the purity. While in memory-assisted model, the purity and quantum correlation can also influence the tightness actively while the quantum entanglement can influence the tightness slightly.

Quantum discord and quantum uncertainty are two important features of the quantum world. In this work, the relation between entropic uncertainty relation and the shareability of quantum discord is studied. By using tripartite quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation, an upper bound for the shareability of quantum discord among different parties of a composite system is obtained. It is also shown that, for a specific class of tripartite states, the obtained relation could be expressed as monogamy of quantum discord. Moreover, it is illustrated that the relation could be generalized and an upper bound for the shareability of quantum discord for multipartite states is derived.

Quantum entanglement is regarded as one of the core concepts, which is used to describe the non-classical correlation between subsystems, and entropic uncertainty relation plays a vital role in quantum precision measurement. It is well known that entanglement of formation can be expressed by von Neumann entropy of subsystems for arbitrary pure states. An interesting question is naturally raised: is there any intrinsic correlation between the entropic uncertainty relation and quantum entanglement? Or if the relation can be applied to estimate the entanglement. In this work, we focus on exploring the complementary relation between quantum entanglement and the entropic uncertainty relation. The results show that there exists an inequality relation between both of them for an arbitrary two-qubit system, and specifically the larger uncertainty will induce the weaker entanglement of the probed system, and vice versa. Besides, we use randomly generated states as illustrations to verify our results. Therefore, we claim that our observations might offer and support the validity of using the entropy uncertainty relation to estimate quantum entanglement.

In solid-state systems, spin squeezing states have acquired much interest in quantum information processing since they are not only essential from a basic physics standpoint but also have many applications, notably reducing noise in interferometry. This paper addresses the study of quantum nonlocality as examined by the violation of the Bell and Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt (CHSH) inequality in two classes of spin squeezing states and how this relates to the quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation (QMA–EUR). The spin squeezing states in the two classes are systematically generated by two twisting nonlinear interactions. These separately describe two spin-[Formula: see text] interaction mechanisms that undergo one-axis twisting (OAT) and two-axis countertwisting (TAC). We investigate each spin squeezing mechanism in a thermal bath ([Formula: see text]) with a transverse magnetic field. Our main results indicate that the degree of violation of the Bell-CHSH inequality and the entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) is typically anticorrelated in both mechanisms. We demonstrate that the spin squeezing states in the OAT mechanism violate the Bell-CHSH inequality and thus exhibit Bell nonlocality only at low temperatures ([Formula: see text]), whereas in the TAC mechanism, increasing the strength of the spin squeezing interaction leads to a violation of the Bell-CHSH inequality even at finite temperatures. We have also shown that there is always an expansion of the EUR and a decrease in the degree of violation of the Bell-CHSH inequality in the high-temperature regime. In addition, the transverse magnetic field exhibits different behavior under the considered temperature regimes in the two classes of spin squeezing states. Other results will also be discussed.

Uncertainty relations and quantum entanglement are pivotal concepts in quantum theory. Beyond their fundamental significance in shaping our understanding of the quantum world, they also underpin crucial applications in quantum information theory. In this article, we investigate entropic uncertainty relations and entanglement detection with an emphasis on quantum measurements with design structures. On the one hand, we derive improved Rényi entropic uncertainty relations for design-structured measurements, exploiting the property that the sum of powered (e.g., squared) probabilities of obtaining different measurement outcomes is now invariant under unitary transformations of the measured system and can be easily computed. On the other hand, the above property essentially imposes a state-independent upper bound, which is achieved at all pure states, on one’s ability to predict local outcomes when performing a set of design-structured measurements on quantum systems. Realizing this, we also obtain criteria for detecting multi-partite entanglement with design-structured measurements.

Although the origin of quantum optics can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century, when the fundamental ideas about the quantum nature of the interaction between light and matter were put forward, the splendid blossoming of this part of physics began half a century later, after the invention of masers and lasers. It is remarkable that after another half a century the tree of quantum optics is not only very strong and spreading, but all its branches continue to grow, showing new beautiful blossoms and giving very useful fruits.

We have investigated the dynamic features of the quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation (QMA EUR) in the amplitude damping (AD) channel. The initial state of qubit system and quantum memory system shared between Alice and Bob is assumed as extended by Werner-like (EWL) state. To reduce the amount of entropic uncertainty of Pauli observables in this noisy channel, we presented a reduction scheme by means of weak measurements (WMs) and weak measurement reversals (WMRs) before and after the entangled system subjecting to the noisy channel. It is shown that the prior WM and poster WMR can effectively reduce quantity of entropic uncertainty, but the poster WM operation cannot played a positive role on reduction of quantity of entropic uncertainty. We hope that our proposal could be verified experimentally and might possibly have future applications in quantum information processing.

We present an equivalence theorem to unify the two classes of uncertainty relations, i.e. the variance-based ones and the entropic forms, showing that the entropy of an operator in a quantum system can be built from the variances of a set of commutative operators. This means that an uncertainty relation in the language of entropy may be mapped onto a variance-based one, and vice versa. Employing the equivalence theorem, alternative formulations of entropic uncertainty relations are obtained for the qubit system that are stronger than the existing ones in the literature, and variance-based uncertainty relations for spin systems are reached from the corresponding entropic uncertainty relations.

Non-Hermitian systems with exceptional points lead to many intriguing phenomena due to the coalescence of both eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors, in comparison to Hermitian systems where only eigenvalues degenerate. In this paper, we have investigated entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) in a non-Hermitian system and revealed a general connection between the EUR and the exceptional points of non-Hermitian system. Compared to the unitarity dynamics determined by a Hermitian Hamiltonian, the behaviors of EUR can be well defined in two different ways depending on whether the system is located in unbroken phase or broken phase regimes. In unbroken phase regime, EUR undergoes an oscillatory behavior while in broken phase regime where the oscillation of EUR breaks down. The exceptional points mark the oscillatory and non-oscillatory behaviors of the EUR. In the dynamical limit, we have identified the witness of critical behavior of non-Hermitian systems in terms of the EUR. Our results reveal that the witness can detect exactly the critical points of non-Hermitian systems beyond (anti-) PT-symmetric systems. Our results may have potential applications to witness and detect phase transition in non-Hermitian systems.

Since neutrino oscillations (NOs) show nonclassical features with the Leggett–Garg inequality and exhibit potential applications in quantum information processing and telecommunications, in order to further reveal quantum properties of the NO systems, we herein focus on investigating entanglement and entropic uncertainty relation in the context of three-flavor NOs. Specifically, we take advantage of three different types of entanglement measures to characterize quantum resources originating from NO systems, and examine the hierarchical relationship among them. Moreover, we analyze the experiment data from different neutrino sources including Daya Bay (0.5 and 1.6 km) and MINOS+ (735 km) collaborations in comparison with our theoretical results. We find that the dynamical evolution of both the entropic uncertainty and entanglement of system shows non-monotonicity, and the experimental results coincide with our theoretical prediction very well. Interestingly, it shows that neutrinos always maintain quantum properties during oscillation process. More importantly, we reveal that the variation of the uncertainty is almost anti-correlated with that of the entanglement of system. Therefore, the nature of entanglement and uncertainty in NOs can be explored in the practical experiment when the three-flavor neutrino states are treated as three-qubit ones, which might be useful for the potential NO-based applications on prospective quantum information processing.

The existence of quantum uncertainty relations is the essential reason that some classically unrealizable cryptographic primitives become realizable when quantum communication is allowed. One operational manifestation of these uncertainty relations is a purely quantum effect referred to as information locking [DiVincenzo et al. 2004]. A locking scheme can be viewed as a cryptographic protocol in which a uniformly random n -bit message is encoded in a quantum system using a classical key of size much smaller than n . Without the key, no measurement of this quantum state can extract more than a negligible amount of information about the message, in which case the message is said to be “locked”. Furthermore, knowing the key, it is possible to recover, that is “unlock”, the message. In this article, we make the following contributions by exploiting a connection between uncertainty relations and low-distortion embeddings of Euclidean spaces into slightly larger spaces endowed with the ℓ 1 norm. We introduce the notion of a metric uncertainty relation and connect it to low-distortion embeddings of ℓ 2 into ℓ 1 . A metric uncertainty relation also implies an entropic uncertainty relation. We prove that random bases satisfy uncertainty relations with a stronger definition and better parameters than previously known. Our proof is also considerably simpler than earlier proofs. We then apply this result to show the existence of locking schemes with key size independent of the message length. Moreover, we give efficient constructions of bases satisfying metric uncertainty relations. The bases defining these metric uncertainty relations are computable by quantum circuits of almost linear size. This leads to the first explicit construction of a strong information locking scheme. These constructions are obtained by adapting an explicit norm embedding due to Indyk [2007] and an extractor construction of Guruswami et al. [2009]. We apply our metric uncertainty relations to exhibit communication protocols that perform equality testing of n -qubit states. We prove that this task can be performed by a single message protocol using O (log 2 n ) qubits and n bits of communication, where the computation of the sender is efficient.

A prominent formulation of the uncertainty principle identifies the fundamental quantum feature that no particle may be prepared with certain outcomes for both position and momentum measurements. Often the statistical uncertainties are thereby measured in terms of entropies providing a clear operational interpretation in information theory and cryptography. Recently, entropic uncertainty relations have been used to show that the uncertainty can be reduced in the presence of entanglement and to prove security of quantum cryptographic tasks. However, much of this recent progress has been focused on observables with only a finite number of outcomes not including Heisenberg’s original setting of position and momentum observables. Here, we show entropic uncertainty relations for general observables with discrete but infinite or continuous spectrum that take into account the power of an entangled observer. As an illustration, we evaluate the uncertainty relations for position and momentum measurements, which is operationally significant in that it implies security of a quantum key distribution scheme based on homodyne detection of squeezed Gaussian states.

Under the scenario of generalized measurements, it can be questioned how much of quantum uncertainty can be attributed to measuring device, independent of the uncertainty in the measured system. On the course to answer the question, we suggest a new class of entropic uncertainty relation that differentiates quantum uncertainty from device imperfection due to the unsharpness of measurement. In order to quantify the unsharpness, we suggest and analyze the quantity that characterizes the uncertainty in the measuring device, based on Shannon entropy. Using the quantity, we obtain a new lower bound of entropic uncertainty with unsharpness and it has been shown that the relation can also be obtained under the scenario that sharp observables are affected by the white noise and amplitude damping.


 
 
 
 We apply the generalised uncertainty principle (GUP) to the entropic uncertainty relation conditions on quantum entanglement. In particular, we study the GUP corrections to the Shannon entropic uncertainty condition for entanglement. We combine previous work on the Shannon entropy entanglement criterion for bipartite systems and the GUP corrections to the Shannon entropy for a single system to calculate the GUP correction for an entangled bipartite system. As in an earlier paper of the second author, which dealt with variance relations, it is shown that there is an increase in the upper bound for the entanglement condition upon the application of the generalised uncertainty principle. Necessary fundamental concepts of the generalised uncertainty principle, entanglement and the entropic uncertainty relations are also discussed. This paper puts together the concepts of entanglement, entropic uncertainty relations and the generalised uncertainty principle all of which have been separately discussed in pedagogical papers by Schroeder, Majernik et al., Blado et al. and Sprenger.