Quantum unsharpness and symplectic rigidity (Q1927641)

The link between ``hard'' topology and an unsharpness principle for generalized quantum observables is established by means of the Berezin-Toeplitz quantization. The starting point is a result from symplectic geometry showing that a partition of unity associated to a sufficiently fine finite open cover of a closed symplectic manifold cannot consist of Poisson-commuting functions. This statement is translated into the quantum language through the Berezin-Toeplitz quantization method. The observables are represented by positive operator valued measures and their unsharpness is measured in terms of noise operator. It is shown that these measures are images of the partitions of unity under Berezin-Toeplitz quantization and they are subject to a systematic intrinsic noise. The rigidity of partitions of unity is used for proving the non-displaceability of certain subsets which cannot be detected by the methods of classical differential geometry and topology. Some open problems on this subject are given: (i) establish in what conditions the positive operator-valued measures are necessarily non-commutative; (ii) explore in detail the relation between robustness and systematic noise; (iii) extend the results to the case of joint quantum measurements; (iv) study the meaning of the symplectic rigidity in quantum dynamics.