A spectral gap for POVMs

Abstract: For a class of positive operator valued measures, we introduce the spectral gap, an invariant which shows up in a number of contexts: the quantum noise operator responsible for the unsharpness of quantum measurements, the Markov chain describing the state reduction for repeated quantum measurements, and the Berezin transform on compact Kahler manifolds. The spectral gap admits a transparent description in terms of geometry of certain metric measure spaces, is related to the diffusion distance, and exhibits a robust behaviour under perturbations in the Wasserstein metric.