Neutron optical test of completeness of quantum root-mean-square errors

Abstract

Abstract While in classical mechanics the mean error of a measurement is solely caused by the measuring process (or device), in quantum mechanics the operator-based nature of quantum measurements has to be considered in the error measure as well. One of the major problems in quantum physics has been to generalize the classical root-mean-square error to quantum measurements to obtain an error measure satisfying both soundness (to vanish for any accurate measurements) and completeness (to vanish only for accurate measurements). A noise-operator-based error measure has been commonly used for this purpose, but it has turned out incomplete. Recently, Ozawa proposed an improved definition for a noise-operator-based error measure to be both sound and complete. Here, we present a neutron optical demonstration for the completeness of the improved error measure for both projective (or sharp) as well as generalized (or unsharp) measurements.