A tomographic approach to the sum uncertainty relation and quantum entanglement in continuous variable systems

Abstract

Entropic uncertainty relations (EURs) have been examined in various contexts, primarily in qubit systems, including their links with entanglement, as they subsume the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. With their genesis in the Shannon entropy, EURs find applications in quantum information and quantum optics. EURs are state-dependent, and the state has to be reconstructed from tomograms (which are histograms readily available from experiments). This is a challenge when the Hilbert space is large, as in continuous variable (CV) systems and certain hybrid quantum (HQ) systems. A viable alternative approach therefore is to extract as much information as possible about the unknown quantum state directly from appropriate tomograms. Many variants of EURs can be extracted from tomograms, even for CV systems. In earlier work we have defined many tomographic entanglement indicators (TEIs) that can be readily calculated from tomograms without knowledge of the density matrix, and have reported on their efficacy as entanglement indicators in various contexts in both CV and HQ systems. The specific objectives of the present work are as follows: (i) To use the tomographic approach to investigate the links between EURs and TEIs in CV and HQ systems as they evolve in time. (ii) To identify the TEI that most closely tracks the temporal evolution of EURs. We consider two generic systems. The first is a multilevel atom modeled as a nonlinear oscillator interacting with a quantized radiation field. The second is the Λ-atom interacting with two radiation fields. The former model accomodates investigations on the role of the initial state of the field and the ratio of the strengths of interaction and nonlinearity in the connection between TEIs and EURs. The second model opens up the possibility of examining the connection between mixed state bipartite entanglement and EURs, when the number of atomic levels is finite. Since the tomogram respects the requirements of classical probability theory, this effort also sheds light on the extent to which TEIs reflect the temporal behaviour of those EURs which are rooted in the Shannon entropy.