On the compatibility of quantum instruments

Abstract: Incompatibility of quantum devices is a useful resource in various quantum information theoretical tasks, and it is at the heart of some fundamental features of quantum theory. While the incompatibility of measurements and quantum channels is well-studied, the incompatibility of quantum instruments has not been explored in much detail. In this work, we revise a notion of instrument compatibility introduced in the literature that we call traditional compatibility. Then, we introduce the new notion of parallel compatibility, and show that these two notions are inequivalent. Then, we argue that the notion of traditional compatibility is incomplete, and prove that while parallel compatibility captures measurement and channel compatibility, traditional compatibility does not. Hence, we propose parallel compatibility as the conceptually complete definition of compatibility of quantum instruments.