An extension of Chaitin's halting probability Ω to a measurement operator in an infinite dimensional quantum system

This paper proposes an extension of Chaitin's halting probability Ω to a measurement operator in an infinite dimensional quantum system. Chaitin's Ω is defined as the probability that the universal self‐delimiting Turing machine U halts, and plays a central role in the development of algorithmic information theory. In the theory, there are two equivalent ways to define the program‐size complexity H ( s ) of a given finite binary string s . In the standard way, H ( s ) is defined as the length of the shortest input string for U to output s . In the other way, the so‐called universal probability m is introduced first, and then H ( s ) is defined as –log 2 m ( s ) without reference to the concept of program‐size. Mathematically, the statistics of outcomes in a quantum measurement are described by a positive operator‐valued measure (POVM) in the most general setting. Based on the theory of computability structures on a Banach space developed by Pour‐El and Richards, we extend the universal probability to an analogue of POVM in an infinite dimensional quantum system, called a universal semi‐POVM. We also give another characterization of Chaitin's Ω numbers by universal probabilities. Then, based on this characterization, we propose to define an extension of Ω as a sum of the POVM elements of a universal semi‐POVM. The validity of this definition is discussed. In what follows, we introduce an operator version $ \hat H $ ( s ) of H ( s ) in a Hilbert space of infinite dimension using a universal semi‐POVM, and study its properties. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)