Experimental test of an entropic measurement uncertainty relation for arbitrary qubit observables

The uncertainty principle is an important tenet and active field of research in quantum physics. Information-theoretic uncertainty relations, formulated using entropies, provide one approach to quantifying the extent to which two non-commuting observables can be jointly measured. Recent theoretical analysis predicts that general quantum measurements are necessary to saturate some such uncertainty relations and thereby overcome certain limitations of projective measurements. Here, we experimentally test a tight information-theoretic measurement uncertainty relation with neutron spin-$1/2$ qubits. The noise associated to the measurement of an observable is defined via conditional Shannon entropies and a tradeoff relation between the noises for two arbitrary spin observables is demonstrated. The optimal bound of this tradeoff is experimentally obtained for various non-commuting spin observables. For some of these observables this lower bound can be reached with projective measurements, but we observe that, in other cases, the tradeoff is only saturated by general quantum measurements (i.e. positive-operator valued measures) as predicted theoretically. These results showcase experimentally the advantage obtainable by general quantum measurements over projective measurements when probing certain uncertainty relations. (paper)