Narrow Results

Each platonic solid defines a single-qubit positive operator-valued measure (POVM) by interpreting its vertices as points on the Bloch sphere. We construct simple circuits for implementing these kinds of measurements and other simple types of symmetric POVMs on one qubit. Each implementation consists of a discrete Fourier transform and some elementary quantum operations followed by an orthogonal measurement in the computational basis.

One of the differences between classical and quantum world is that in the former we can always perform a measurement that gives certain outcomes for all pure states, while such a situation is not possible in the latter one. The degree of randomness of the distribution of the measurement outcomes can be quantified by the Shannon entropy. While it is well known that this entropy, as a function of quantum states, needs to be minimized by some pure states, we would like to address the question how ‘badly’ can we end by choosing initially any pure state, i.e., which pure states produce the maximal amount of uncertainty under given measurement. We find these maximizers for all highly symmetric POVMs in dimension 2, and for all SIC-POVMs in any dimension.