Entropic Uncertainty for Biased Measurements

Abstract

Entropic uncertainty relations are powerful tools, especially in quantum cryptography. They typically bound the amount of uncertainty a third-party adversary may hold on a measurement outcome as a result of the measurement overlap. However, when the two measurement bases are biased towards one another, standard entropic uncertainty relations do not always provide optimal lower bounds on the entropy. Here, we derive a new entropic uncertainty relation, for certain quantum states and for instances where the two measurement bases are no longer mutually unbiased. We evaluate our bound on two different quantum cryptographic protocols, including BB84 with faulty/biased measurement devices, and show that our new bound can produce higher key-rates under several scenarios when compared with prior work using standard entropic uncertainty relations.