Quantifying coherence of quantum measurements

Abstract

In this work we investigate how to quantify the coherence of quantum measurements. First, we establish a resource theoretical framework to address the coherence of measurement and show that any statistical distance can be adopted to define a coherence monotone of measurement. For instance, the relative entropy fulfills all the required properties as a proper monotone. We specifically introduce a coherence monotone of measurement in terms of off-diagonal elements of positive-operator-valued measure components. This quantification provides a lower bound on the robustness of measurement-coherence that has an operational meaning as the maximal advantage over all incoherent measurements in state discrimination tasks. Finally, we propose an experimental scheme to assess our quantification of measurement-coherence and demonstrate it by performing an experiment using a single qubit on IBM Q processor.

Keywords

• quantum coherence
• quantum measurements
• quantum foundations
• resource theories
• quantum information