Fidelity of Physical Measurements

Abstract: The fidelity (Shannon mutual information between measurements and physical quantities) is proposed as a quantitative measure of the quality of physical measurements. The fidelity does not depend on the true value of unknown physical quantities (as does the Fisher information) and it allows for the role of prior information in the measurement process. The fidelity is general enough to allow a natural comparison of the quality of classical and quantum measurements. As an example, the fidelity is used to compare the quality of measurements made by a classical and a quantum Mach-Zehnder interferometer.