English

A geometric formulation of uncertainty principle

Quantum Physics 2015-06-16 v2

Abstract

A geometric approach to formulate the uncertainty principle between quantum observables acting on an NN-dimensional Hilbert space is proposed. We consider the fidelity between a density operator associated with a quantum system and a projector associated with an observable, and interpret it as the probability of obtaining the outcome corresponding to that projector. We make use of fidelity-based metrics such as angle, Bures and root-infidelity ones, to propose a measure of uncertainty. The triangle inequality allows us to derive a family of uncertainty relations. In the case of the angle metric, we re-obtain the Landau--Pollak inequality for pure states and show, in a natural way, how to extend it to the case of mixed states in arbitrary dimension. In addition, we derive and compare novel uncertainty relations when using other known fidelity-based metrics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1308.4029,
  title  = {A geometric formulation of uncertainty principle},
  author = {G. M. Bosyk and T. M. Osán and P. W. Lamberti and M. Portesi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.4029},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

8 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T01:11:33.838Z