1995/04/01 by Paul Busch, P. Busch, Pekka Lahti +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Biofield Effects and Biophysics #Complementarity (molecular biology) #Mathematics #Observable #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum mechanics #Statistical physics #Theoretical physics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/bf02743814
published as Rivista del Nuovo Cimento 18(4) (1995) 1-27 · 28 pages, 3 figures in pdf format. This review paper, which appeared in 1995, is being made available here in view of the renewed strong interest in complementarity during recent years
openalex publication_date 1995/04/01 · arxiv created 2004/06/18 · arxiv updated 2011/01/04 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Three notions of complementarity - operational, probabilistic, and value complementarity - are reanalysed with respect to the question of joint measurements and compared with reference to some examples of canonically conjugate observables. It is shown that the joint measurability of noncommuting observables is a consequence of the quantum formalism if unsharp observables are taken into account; a fact not in conflict with the idea of complementarity, which, in its strongest version, was originally formulated only for sharp observables. As an illustration of the general theory, the wave-particle duality of photons is analysed in terms of complementary path and interference observables and their unsharp joint measurability.