Geometric and algebraic origins of additive uncertainty relations

Abstract

Constructive techniques to establish state-independent uncertainty relations for the sum of variances of arbitrary two observables are presented. We investigate the range of simultaneously attainable pairs of variances, which can be applied to a wide variety of problems including finding exact bound for the sum of variances of two components of angular momentum operator for any total angular momentum quantum number $j$ and detection of quantum entanglement. Resulting uncertainty relations are state-independent, semianalytical, bounded-error and can be made arbitrarily tight. The advocated approach, based on the notion of joint numerical range of a number of observables and uncertainty range, allows us to improve earlier numerical works and to derive semianalytical tight bounds for the uncertainty relation for the sum of variances expressed as roots of a polynomial of a single real variable.