State-Independent Uncertainty Relations and Entanglement Detection in Noisy Systems

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Oct 27;119(17):170404. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.170404. Epub 2017 Oct 27.

Abstract

Quantifying quantum mechanical uncertainty is vital for the increasing number of experiments that reach the uncertainty limited regime. We present a method for computing tight variance uncertainty relations, i.e., the optimal state-independent lower bound for the sum of the variances for any set of two or more measurements. The bounds come with a guaranteed error estimate, so results of preassigned accuracy can be obtained straightforwardly. Our method also works for postive-operator-valued measurements. Therefore, it can be used for detecting entanglement in noisy environments, even in cases where conventional spin squeezing criteria fail because of detector noise.