Simulating quantum instruments with projective measurements and quantum post-processing

Abstract: Quantum instruments describe both the classical outcome and the updated state associated with a quantum measurement. We ask whether these processes can be simulated using only a natural subset of resources, namely projective measurements on the system and quantum processing of the post-measurement states. We show that the simulability of instruments can be connected to an entanglement classification problem. This leads to a computationally efficient necessary condition for simulation of generic instruments and to a complete characterisation for qubits. We use this to address relevant quantum information tasks, namely (i) the noise-tolerance of standard qubit unsharp measurements, (ii) non-projective advantages in information-disturbance trade-offs, and (iii) increased sequential Bell inequality violations under projective measurements. Moreover, we consider also $d$-dimensional L\"uders instruments that correspond to weak versions of standard basis measurements and show that for large $d$ these can permit scalable noise-advantages over projective implementations.