Projective simulation of quantum measurements and instruments



Abstract:
Standard measurements in quantum theory are complete sets of orthogonal projectors. However, it is well-established that the full scope of quantum measurements is represented by the more general notion of positive operator-valued measures (POVMs). These have been shown to outperform standard projective measurements for a variety of tasks in quantum information processing; however, they are harder to implement in experiments. Therefore, a number of works have asked the natural question: how well can one simulate POVMs with projective measurements?
The talk will introduce basic quantum measurement theory and comment on the usefulness of POVMs. Motivate the notion of projective simulation and comment on the "most non-projective measurement" and hint at how the results can be extended to the more general concept of quantum instruments.
References:
1. arXiv:2508.03652 (2025)
2. Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 040202 (2025)
All are cordially invited.

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