English

Optimal uncertainty relations in a modified Heisenberg algebra

Quantum Physics 2016-12-14 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Various theories that aim at unifying gravity with quantum mechanics suggest modifications of the Heisenberg algebra for position and momentum. From the perspective of quantum mechanics, such modifications lead to new uncertainty relations which are thought (but not proven) to imply the existence of a minimal observable length. Here we prove this statement in a framework of sufficient physical and structural assumptions. Moreover, we present a general method that allows to formulate optimal and state-independent variance-based uncertainty relations. In addition, instead of variances, we make use of entropies as a measure of uncertainty and provide uncertainty relations in terms of min- and Shannon entropies. We compute the corresponding entropic minimal lengths and find that the minimal length in terms of min-entropy is exactly one bit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.00081,
  title  = {Optimal uncertainty relations in a modified Heisenberg algebra},
  author = {Kais Abdelkhalek and Wissam Chemissany and Leander Fiedler and Gianpiero Mangano and René Schwonnek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.00081},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

20 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:40:16.740Z