Heisenberg's error-disturbance relations: a joint measurement-based experimental test

Abstract

The Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation is a cornerstone of quantum physics. It was recently shown to be not universally valid and two different approaches to reformulate it were proposed.The first one focuses on how error and disturbance of two observables, A and B, depend on a particular quantum state. The second one asks how a joint measurement of A and B affects their eigenstates. Previous experiments focused on the first approach. Here, we focus on the second one. Firstly, we propose and implement an extendible method for quantum walk-based joint measurements of noisy Pauli operators to test the error-disturbance relation for qubits. Then, we formulate and experimentally test a new universally valid relation for the three mutually unbiased observables. We therefore establish a fundamentally new method of testing error-disturbance relations.