Important announcement

Dear visitor,

Please note that this OpenCourseWare platform will be replaced at the end of 2026 by a new platform (under the same url ocw.tudelft.nl).

Courses and their contents that are currently available the platform will partly be migrated. URL’s for this content will change and content might be unavailable for some time. In addition, some courses will not be available anymore.

If you are linking to specific courses on this platform (for instance for your students), please take timely measures to avoid problems with access. Possible actions are:

  • Download the materials to your local platform (laptop, server)
  • For educators only (including TU Delft lecturers): Contact us at ocw@tudelft.nl and inform us what course you are using in what context (institute, program, period of use, number of students). We will research (in collaboration with the authors of the course) and decide if we will migrate the course, and if yes, can supply you with a new url.

Thank you.

1.2.2 Measurement operators

Course subject(s) Module 1: Working with Single Qubits

Now that we have learned about the Born Rule, we are able to study the measurements and how they affect a quantum state.

Arjen helps us understand how a projective quantum measurement can be expressed in the braket notation. This is done by the measurement operators, which let us know the probability of measuring a certain state and the remaining state after performing such a measurement.

Main Takeaways

  • The sandwich rule calculates the probability or expectation value of a certain measurement. The latter is the inner product of the initial state and the state resulting from the measurement.
  • The identity rule states that the sum over all measurement operators in a basis is the identity matrix.
  • The normalization rule expresses that after applying a measurement operator on a quantum state, this needs to be divided by the square root of the probability of such measurement to normalize it.
Creative Commons License
Fundamentals of Quantum Information by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/fundamentals-of-quantum-information/ /
Back to top
[sg_popup id=6]