Coexistence of effects from an algebra of two projections

Abstract

The coexistence relation of quantum effects is a fundamental structure, describing those pairs of experimental events that can be implemented in a single setup. Only in the simplest case of qubit effects an analytic characterization of coexistent pairs is known. We generalize the qubit coexistence characterization to all pairs of effects in arbitrary dimension that belong to the von Neumann algebra generated by two projections. We demonstrate the presented mathematical machinery by several examples, and show that it covers physically relevant classes of effect pairs.