Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 59 3 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
For the Kraus operators of the measurement in quantum mechanics, the Born rule givesThe density matrix is the unnormalized state of that outcome. It is positive, its trace is , and completeness gives . There is no conditional state to assign to an event with .
For a projective measurement, each is an orthogonal projection, satisfying . Completeness becomes . Fix in the range of . ThenSince , the th summand already equals . All other summands are nonnegative, so for . Consequently , and taking adjoints also gives . This proves the stronger completeness forces orthogonality of measurement projections:
For the unitary dilation of a measurement instrument, take a quantum ancilla with orthonormal states , initially in . DefineThe completeness equation impliesso is an isometry. Its action on the input subspace can be extended to a unitary operator on the enlarged system:Choose orthonormal bases in the two complementary subspaces and map one to the other. Their dimensions agree; the extra unused quantum ancilla level also ensures this extension is possible for an infinite-dimensional system. After the coupling, the joint density matrix is
Now perform a projective measurement on the larger system, withThese are pairwise orthogonal and sum to the full identity. The unused level has zero weight in , so merging it into outcome one adds no probability. For every ,Its trace is , and taking the partial trace over the quantum ancilla after normalization gives exactly . Hence unitary coupling to an quantum ancilla, a projective measurement, and discarding the quantum ancilla reproduce both the probabilities and the conditional states of the general measurement. This is the instrument version of a Stinespring dilation, rather than a construction reproducing only the outcome probabilities.