The role of system–meter entanglement in controlling the resolution and decoherence of quantum measurements

Abstract

Abstract Measurement processes can be separated into an entangling interaction between the system and a meter and a subsequent readout of the meter state that does not involve any further interactions with the system. In the interval between these two stages, the system and the meter are in an entangled state that encodes all possible effects of the readout in the form of non-local quantum correlations between the system and the meter. Here, we show that the entanglement generated in the system–meter interaction expresses a fundamental relation between the amount of decoherence and the conditional probabilities that describe the resolution of the measurement. Specifically, the entanglement generated by the measurement interaction correlates both the target observable and the back-action effects on the system with sets of non-commuting physical properties in the meter. The choice of readout in the meter determines the trade-off between irreversible decoherence and measurement information by steering the system into a corresponding set of conditional output states. The Hilbert space algebra of entanglement ensures that the irreversible part of the decoherence is exactly equal to the Hellinger distance describing the resolution achieved in the measurement. We can thus demonstrate that the trade-off between measurement resolution and back-action is a fundamental property of the entanglement generated in measurement interactions.