An operator-based bound on information and disturbance in quantum measurements

Abstract

Quantum measurements can be described by operators that assign conditional probabilities to different outcomes while also describing unavoidable physical changes to the system. Here, we point out that operators describing information gain at minimal disturbance can be expanded into a set of unitary operators representing experimentally distinguishable patterns of disturbance. The observable statistics of disturbance defines a tight upper bound on the information gain of the measurement.