Uncertainty and Complementarity Relations in Weak Measurement

Abstract

We prove uncertainty relations that quantitatively express the impossibility of jointly sharp preparation of pre- and post-selected quantum states for measuring incompatible observables during the weak measurement. By defining a suitable operator whose average in the pre-selected quantum state gives the weak value, we show that one can have new uncertainty relations for variances of two such operators corresponding to two non-commuting observables. These generalize the recent stronger uncertainty relations that give non-trivial lower bounds for the sum of variances of two observables which fully capture the concept of incompatible observables. Furthermore, we show that weak values for two non-commuting projection operators obey a complementarity relation. Specifically, we show that for a pre-selected state if we measure a projector corresponding to an observable $A$ weakly followed by the strong measurement of another observable $B$ (for the post-selection) and, for the same pre-selected state we measure a projector corresponding to an observable $B$ weakly followed by the strong measurement of the observable $A$ (for the post-selection), then the product of these two weak values is always less than one. This shows that even though individually they are complex and can be large, their product is always bounded.