Clean positive operator valued measures

In quantum mechanics the statistics of the outcomes of a measuring apparatus is described by a positive operator valued measure (POVM). A quantum channel transforms POVMs into POVMs, generally irreversibly, thus losing some of the information retrieved from the measurement. This poses the problem of which POVMs are undisturbed, i.e., they are not irreversibly connected to another POVM. We will call such POVMs clean. In a sense, the clean POVMs would be perfect, since they would not have any additional extrinsical noise. Quite unexpectedly, it turns out that such a cleanness property is largely unrelated to the convex structure of POVMs, and there are clean POVMs that are not extremal and vice versa. In this article we solve the cleannes classification problem for number n of outcomes n <= d (d dimension of the Hilbert space), and we provide a set of either necessary or sufficient conditions for n > d, along with an iff condition for the case of informationally complete POVMs for n=d(2). (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.