Confidence uncertainty: position and momentum can be jointly determined with a guaranteed probability

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04484v1
• Date: Wed, 06 May 2026 04:29:01 GMT
• Title: Confidence uncertainty: position and momentum can be jointly determined with a guaranteed probability
• Abstract summary: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot be sharply determined simultaneously.<n>Standard-deviation and entropic formulations capture the spread of the probability distribution but say little about the probability itself contained in a small region.<n>We introduce the "confidence uncertainty" $cx(_x)$ as the minimal Lebesgue measure of the support set in which the particle is found with probability at least $_x$.
• Score: 6.911044030089646
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot be sharply determined simultaneously. Standard-deviation and entropic formulations capture the spread of the probability distribution but say little about the probability itself contained in a small region. We introduce the "confidence uncertainty" $Δ^{c}x(θ_x)$ as the minimal Lebesgue measure of the support set in which the particle is found with probability at least $θ_x$, and the companion "interval confidence uncertainty" $Δ^{I}x(θ_x)$ which restricts the support to a single interval. We prove two complementary uncertainty inequalities. (i) For $θ_x+θ_p\le 1$ both confidence uncertainties can be made arbitrarily small simultaneously, so that no nontrivial product bound holds; in particular, position and momentum can be jointly localised with probability at least~$50\%$. (ii) For $θ_x+θ_p>1$ a lower bound holds: combining Lenard's projection inequality with the Donoho--Stark operator-norm bound we obtain $Δ^{c}x\,Δ^{c}p\geq 2π\hbar\bigl(\sqrt{θ_xθ_p}-\sqrt{(1-θ_x)(1-θ_p)}\bigr)^{\!2}$, and for the interval version we obtain the sharp implicit Landau--Pollak bound $Δ^{I}x\,Δ^{I}p\geq 4\hbar\,λ_{0}^{-1}\!\bigl((\sqrt{θ_xθ_p}-\sqrt{(1-θ_x)(1-θ_p)})^{2}\bigr)$, where $λ_{0}(c)$ is the largest prolate-spheroidal eigenvalue. We support the analytical bounds with numerical evaluation of $λ_{0}(c)$, provide closed-form small-$c$ and large-$c$ asymptotics, compute the optimal Slepian-superposition states that saturate the interval bound, and compare the resulting product against the variance Heisenberg--Kennard, the Białynicki-Birula--Mycielski entropic, and the Donoho--Stark concentration bounds.

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