On the simulation of quantum multimeters

In the quest for robust and universal quantum devices, the notion of simulation plays a crucial role, both from a theoretical and from an applied perspective. In this work, we go beyond the simulation of quantum channels and quantum measurements, studying what it means to simulate a collection of measurements, which we call a multimeter. To this end, we first explicitly characterize the completely positive transformations between multimeters. However, not all of these transformations correspond to valid simulations, as otherwise we could create any resource from nothing. For example, the set of transformations includes maps that always prepare the same multimeter regardless of the input, which we call trash-and-prepare. From the perspective of an experimenter with a given multimeter as part of a complicated setup, having to discard the multimeter and using a different one instead is undesirable. We give a new definition of multimeter simulations as transformations that are triviality-preserving, i.e., when given a multimeter consisting of trivial measurements they can only produce another trivial multimeter. In the absence of a quantum ancilla, we then characterize the transformations that are triviality-preserving and the transformations that are trash-and-prepare. Finally, we use these characterizations to compare our new definition of multimeter simulation to three existing ones: classical simulations, compression of multimeters, and compatibility-preserving simulations.