Information - Disturbance Tradeoff in the Estimation of a Unitary Transformation

Abstract: We address the problem of the information-disturbance trade-off associated to the estimation of a quantum transformation, and show how the extraction of information about the a black box causes a perturbation of the corresponding input-output evolution. In the case of a black box performing a unitary transformation, randomly distributed according to the invariant measure, we give a complete solution of the problem, deriving the optimal trade-off curve and presenting an explicit construction of the optimal quantum network.