applied sciences Review Measurements of Entropic Uncertainty Relations in Neutron Optics Bülent Demirel 1,† , Stephan Sponar 2,*,† and Yuji Hasegawa 2,3 1 Institute for Functional Matter and Quantum Technologies, University of Stuttgart, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany;
[email protected] 2 Atominstitut, Vienna University of Technology, A-1020 Vienna, Austria;
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[email protected] 3 Division of Applied Physics, Hokkaido University Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-8628, Japan * Correspondence:
[email protected] † These authors contributed equally to this work. Received: 30 December 2019; Accepted: 4 February 2020; Published: 6 February 2020 Abstract: The emergence of the uncertainty principle has celebrated its 90th anniversary recently. For this occasion, the latest experimental results of uncertainty relations quantified in terms of Shannon entropies are presented, concentrating only on outcomes in neutron optics. The focus is on the type of measurement uncertainties that describe the inability to obtain the respective individual results from joint measurement statistics. For this purpose, the neutron spin of two non-commuting directions is analyzed. Two sub-categories of measurement uncertainty relations are considered: noise–noise and noise–disturbance uncertainty relations. In the first case, it will be shown that the lowest boundary can be obtained and the uncertainty relations be saturated by implementing a simple positive operator-valued measure (POVM). For the second category, an analysis for projective measurements is made and error correction procedures are presented. Keywords: uncertainty relation; joint measurability; quantum information theory; Shannon entropy; noise and disturbance; foundations of quantum measurement; neutron optics 1. Introduction According to quantum mechanics, any single observable or a set of compatible observables can be measured with arbitrary accuracy.