Measurement incompatibility is strictly stronger than disturbance

Abstract

The core of Heisenberg's heuristic argument for the uncertainty principle, involving the famous $\gamma$-ray microscope $\text{Gedankenexperiment}$, hinges upon the existence of measurements that irreversibly alter the state of the system on which they are acting, causing an irreducible disturbance on subsequent measurements. The argument was put forward to justify measurement incompatibility in quantum theory, namely, the existence of measurements that cannot be performed jointly$-$a feature that is now understood to be different from irreversibility of measurement disturbance, though related to it. In this article, on the one hand, we provide a compelling argument showing that measurement incompatibility is indeed a sufficient condition for irreversibility of measurement disturbance; while, on the other hand, we exhibit a toy theory, termed the minimal classical theory (MCT), that is a counterexample for the converse implication. This theory is classical, hence it does not have complementarity nor preparation uncertainty relations, and it is both Kochen-Specker and generalised noncontextual. However, MCT satisfies not only irreversibility of measurement disturbance, but also the properties of no-information without disturbance and no-broadcasting, implying that these cannot be understood $\text{per se}$ as signatures of nonclassicality.

6+9 pages; no figures, lots of diagrams

References in corpus (5)

• A generalized no-broadcasting theorem
• All measurements in a probabilistic theory are compatible if and only if the state space is a simplex
• What is nonclassical about uncertainty relations?
• Unifying different notions of quantum incompatibility into a strict hierarchy of resource theories of communication
• Incompatibility of observables, channels and instruments in information theories

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• Which entropy for general physical theories?