Measurement-Disturbance Tradeoff Outperforming Optimal Cloning

One of the characteristic features of quantum mechanics is that every measurement that extracts information about a general quantum system necessarily causes an unavoidable disturbance to the state of this system. A plethora of different approaches has been developed to characterize and optimize this tradeoff. Here, we apply the framework of quantum instruments to investigate the optimal tradeoff and to derive a class of procedures that is optimal with respect to most meaningful measures. We focus our analysis on binary measurements on qubits as commonly used in communication and computation protocols and demonstrate theoretically and in an experiment that the optimal universal asymmetric quantum cloner, albeit ideal for cloning, is not an optimal procedure for measurements and can be outperformed with high significance.