For almost every student of physics, the first course on quantum theory raises a lot of puzzling questions and creates a very uncertain picture of the quantum world. This book presents a clear and detailed exposition of the fundamental concepts of quantum theory: states, effects, observables, channels and instruments. It introduces several up-to-date topics, such as state discrimination, quantum tomography, measurement disturbance and entanglement distillation. A separate chapter is devoted to quantum entanglement. The theory is illustrated with numerous examples, reflecting recent developments in the field. The treatment emphasises quantum information, though its general approach makes it a useful resource for graduate students and researchers in all subfields of quantum theory. Focusing on mathematically precise formulations, the book summarises the relevant mathematics.

In the context of a physical theory, two devices, A and B, described by the theory are called incompatible if the theory does not allow the existence of a third device C that would have both A and B as its components. Incompatibility is a fascinating aspect of physical theories, especially in the case of quantum theory. The concept of incompatibility gives a common ground for several famous impossibility statements within quantum theory, such as "no-cloning" and "no information without disturbance"; these can be all seen as statements about incompatibility of certain devices. The purpose of this paper is to give a concise overview of some of the central aspects of incompatibility.

Abstract. We provide a detailed analysis of the question: how many measurement settings or outcomes are needed in order to identify an unknown quantum state which is constrained by prior information? We show that if the prior information restricts the possible states to a set of lower dimensionality, then topological obstructions can increase the required number of outcomes by a factor of two over the number of real parameters needed to characterize the set of all states. Conversely, we show that almost every measurement becomes informationally complete with respect to the constrained set if the number of outcomes exceeds twice the Minkowski dimension of the set. We apply the obtained results to determine the minimal number of outcomes of measurements which are informationally complete with respect to states with rank constraints. In particular, we show that the minimal number of measurement outcomes (POVM elements) necessary to identify all pure states in a d-dimensional Hilbert space is 4d − 3 − c(d)α(d) for some c(d) ∈ [1, 2] and α(d) being the number of ones appearing in the binary expansion of (d − 1).

Abstract. For sharp quantum observables the following facts hold: (i) if we have a collection of sharp observables and each pair of them is jointly measurable, then they are jointly measurable all together; (ii) if two sharp observables are jointly measurable, then their joint observable is unique and it gives the greatest lower bound for the effects corresponding to the observables; (iii) if we have two sharp observables and their every possible two outcome partitionings are jointly measurable, then the observables themselves are jointly measurable. We show that, in general, these properties do not hold. Also some possible candidates which would accompany joint measurability and generalize these apparently useful properties are discussed.