Five Measurement Bases Determine Pure Quantum States on Any Dimension

Complete Physical Characterization of Quantum Nondemolition Measurements via Tomography

We introduce a self-consistent tomography for arbitrary quantum nondemolition (QND) detectors. Based on this, we build a complete physical characterization of the detector, including the measurement processes and a quantification of the fidelity, ideality, and backaction of the measurement. This framework is a diagnostic tool for the dynamics of QND detectors, allowing us to identify errors, and to improve their calibration and design. We illustrate this on a realistic Jaynes-Cummings simulation of a superconducting qubit readout. We characterize nondispersive errors, quantify the backaction introduced by the readout cavity, and calibrate the optimal measurement point.

Robust Quantum State Tomography Method for Quantum Sensing

Reliable and efficient reconstruction of pure quantum states under the processing of noisy measurement data is a vital tool in fundamental and applied quantum information sciences owing to communication, sensing, and computing. Specifically, the purity of such reconstructed quantum systems is crucial in surpassing the classical shot-noise limit and achieving the Heisenberg limit, regarding the achievable precision in quantum sensing. However, the noisy reconstruction of such resourceful sensing probes limits the quantum advantage in precise quantum sensing. For this, we formulate a pure quantum state reconstruction method through eigenvalue decomposition. We show that the proposed method is robust against the depolarizing noise; it remains unaffected under high strength white noise and achieves quantum state reconstruction accuracy similar to the noiseless case.

Self-guided quantum state tomography for limited resources

Quantum state tomography is a process for estimating an unknown quantum state; which is innately probabilistic. The exponential growth of unknown parameters to be estimated is a fundamental difficulty in realizing quantum state tomography for higher dimensions. Iterative optimization algorithms like self-guided quantum tomography have been effective in robust and accurate ascertaining a quantum state even with exponential growth in Hilbert space. We propose a faster convergent simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation algorithm which is more practical in a resource-deprived situation for determining the underlying quantum states by incorporating the Barzilai–Borwein two-point step size gradient method with minimal loss of accuracy.

Ptychographic reconstruction of pure quantum states

The quantum analogue of ptychography, a powerful coherent diffractive imaging technique, is a simple method for reconstructing d-dimensional pure states. It relies on measuring partially overlapping parts of the input state in a single orthonormal basis and feeding the outcomes to an iterative phase retrieval algorithm for postprocessing. We provide a proof of concept demonstration of this method by determining pure states given by superpositions of d transverse spatial modes of an optical field. A set of n rank-r projectors, diagonal in the spatial mode basis, is used to generate n partially overlapping parts of the input, and each part is projectively measured in the Fourier transformed basis. For d up to 32, we successfully reconstructed hundreds of random states using n=5 and n=d rank-⌈d/2⌉ projectors. The extension of quantum ptychography for other types of photonic spatial modes is outlined.

Adaptive State Fidelity Estimation for Higher Dimensional Bipartite Entanglement

An adaptive method for quantum state fidelity estimation in bipartite higher dimensional systems is established. This method employs state verifier operators which are constructed by local POVM operators and adapted to the measurement statistics in the computational basis. Employing this method, the state verifier operators that stabilize Bell-type entangled states are constructed explicitly. Together with an error operator in the computational basis, one can estimate the lower and upper bounds on the state fidelity for Bell-type entangled states in few measurement configurations. These bounds can be tighter than the fidelity bounds derived in [Bavaresco et al., Nature Physics (2018), 14, 1032–1037], if one constructs more than one local POVM measurements additional to the measurement in the computational basis.

Estimation of pure quantum states in high dimension at the limit of quantum accuracy through complex optimization and statistical inference

Quantum tomography has become a key tool for the assessment of quantum states, processes, and devices. This drives the search for tomographic methods that achieve greater accuracy. In the case of mixed states of a single 2-dimensional quantum system adaptive methods have been recently introduced that achieve the theoretical accuracy limit deduced by Hayashi and Gill and Massar. However, accurate estimation of higher-dimensional quantum states remains poorly understood. This is mainly due to the existence of incompatible observables, which makes multiparameter estimation difficult. Here we present an adaptive tomographic method and show through numerical simulations that, after a few iterations, it is asymptotically approaching the fundamental Gill–Massar lower bound for the estimation accuracy of pure quantum states in high dimension. The method is based on a combination of stochastic optimization on the field of the complex numbers and statistical inference, exceeds the accuracy of any mixed-state tomographic method, and can be demonstrated with current experimental capabilities. The proposed method may lead to new developments in quantum metrology.

δ-Quench Measurement of a Pure Quantum-State Wave Function

The measurement of a quantum state wave function not only acts as a fundamental part in quantum physics but also plays an important role in developing practical quantum technologies. Conventional quantum state tomography has been widely used to estimate quantum wave functions, which usually requires complicated measurement techniques. The recent weak-value-based quantum measurement circumvents this resource issue but relies on an extra pointer space. Here, we theoretically propose and then experimentally demonstrate a direct and efficient measurement strategy based on a δ-quench probe: by quenching its complex probability amplitude one by one (δ quench) in the given basis, we can directly obtain the quantum wave function of a pure ensemble by projecting the quenched state onto a postselection state. We confirm its power by experimentally measuring photonic complex temporal wave functions. This new method is versatile and can find applications in quantum information science and engineering.

Stochastic optimization on complex variables and pure-state quantum tomography

Real-valued functions of complex arguments violate the Cauchy-Riemann conditions and, consequently, do not have Taylor series expansion. Therefore, optimization methods based on derivatives cannot be directly applied to this class of functions. This is circumvented by mapping the problem to the field of the real numbers by considering real and imaginary parts of the complex arguments as the new independent variables. We introduce a stochastic optimization method that works within the field of the complex numbers. This has two advantages: Equations on complex arguments are simpler and easy to analyze and the use of the complex structure leads to performance improvements. The method produces a sequence of estimates that converges asymptotically in mean to the optimizer. Each estimate is generated by evaluating the target function at two different randomly chosen points. Thereby, the method allows the optimization of functions with unknown parameters. Furthermore, the method exhibits a large performance enhancement. This is demonstrated by comparing its performance with other algorithms in the case of quantum tomography of pure states. The method provides solutions which can be two orders of magnitude closer to the true minima or achieve similar results as other methods but with three orders of magnitude less resources.

Ptychography of pure quantum states

Ptychography is an imaging technique in which a localized illumination scans overlapping regions of an object and generates a set of diffraction intensities used to computationally reconstruct its complex-valued transmission function. We propose a quantum analogue of this technique designed to reconstruct d-dimensional pure states. A set of n rank-r projectors “scans” overlapping parts of an input state and the moduli of the d Fourier amplitudes of each part are measured. These nd outcomes are fed into an iterative phase retrieval algorithm that estimates the state. Using d up to 100 and r around d / 2, we performed numerical simulations for single systems in an economic (n = 4) and a costly (n = d) scenario, as well as for multiqubit systems (n = 6logd). This numeric study included realistic amounts of depolarization and poissonian noise, and all scenarios yielded, in general, reconstructions with infidelities below 10⁻². The method is shown, therefore, to be resilient to noise and, for any d, requires a simple and fast postprocessing algorithm. We show that the algorithm is equivalent to an alternating gradient search, which ensures that it does not suffer from local-minima stagnation. Unlike traditional approaches to state reconstruction, the ptychographic scheme uses a single measurement basis; the diversity and redundancy in the measured data—key for its success—are provided by the overlapping projections. We illustrate the simplicity of this scheme with the paradigmatic multiport interferometer.

Unrestricted generation of pure two-qubit states and entanglement diagnosis by single-qubit tomography

We present an experimental proof-of-principle for the generation and detection of pure two-qubit states that have been encoded in degrees of freedom that are common to both classical-light beams and single photons. Our protocol requires performing polarization tomography on a single qubit from a qubit pair. The degree of entanglement in the qubit pair is measured by concurrence, which can be directly extracted from intensity measurements-or photon counting-entering single-qubit polarization tomography.

Confidence Polytopes in Quantum State Tomography

Quantum state tomography is the task of inferring the state of a quantum system from measurement data. A reliable tomography scheme should not only report an estimate for that state, but also well-justified error bars. These may be specified in terms of confidence regions, i.e., subsets of the state space which contain the system's state with high probability. Here, building upon a quantum generalization of Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals-a notion known from classical statistics-we present a simple and reliable scheme for generating confidence regions. These have the shape of a polytope and can be computed efficiently. We provide several examples to demonstrate the practical usability of the scheme in experiments.

Set of 4d-3 observables to determine any pure qudit state

We present a tomographic method which requires only 4d-3 measurement outcomes to reconstruct any pure quantum state of arbitrary dimension d. Using the proposed scheme, we have experimentally reconstructed a large number of pure states of dimension d=7, obtaining a mean fidelity of 0.94. Moreover, we performed numerical simulations of the reconstruction process, verifying the feasibility of the method for higher dimensions. In addition, the a priori assumption of purity can be certified within the same set of measurements, which represents an improvement with respect to other similar methods and contributes to answering the question of how many observables are needed to uniquely determine any pure state.

Direct Reconstruction of the Quantum Density Matrix by Strong Measurements

New techniques based on weak measurements have recently been introduced to the field of quantum state reconstruction. Some of them allow the direct measurement of each matrix element of an unknown density operator and need only O(d) different operations, compared to d^{2} linearly independent projectors in the case of standard quantum state tomography, for the reconstruction of an arbitrary mixed state. However, due to the weakness of these couplings, these protocols are approximated and prone to large statistical errors. We propose a method which is similar to the weak measurement protocols but works regardless of the coupling strength: our protocol is not approximated and thus improves the accuracy and precision of the results with respect to weak measurement schemes. We experimentally apply it to the polarization state of single photons and compare the results to those of preexisting methods for different values of the coupling strength. Our results show that our method outperforms previous proposals in terms of accuracy and statistical errors.

High-Dimensional Quantum Communication Complexity beyond Strategies Based on Bell's Theorem

Quantum resources can improve communication complexity problems (CCPs) beyond their classical constraints. One quantum approach is to share entanglement and create correlations violating a Bell inequality, which can then assist classical communication. A second approach is to resort solely to the preparation, transmission, and measurement of a single quantum system, in other words, quantum communication. Here, we show the advantages of the latter over the former in high-dimensional Hilbert space. We focus on a family of CCPs, based on facet Bell inequalities, study the advantage of high-dimensional quantum communication, and realize such quantum communication strategies using up to ten-dimensional systems. The experiment demonstrates, for growing dimension, an increasing advantage over quantum strategies based on Bell inequality violation. For sufficiently high dimensions, quantum communication also surpasses the limitations of the postquantum Bell correlations obeying only locality in the macroscopic limit. We find that the advantages are tied to the use of measurements that are not rank-one projective, and provide an experimental semi-device-independent falsification of such measurements in Hilbert space dimension six.

Certifying an Irreducible 1024-Dimensional Photonic State Using Refined Dimension Witnesses

We report on a new class of dimension witnesses, based on quantum random access codes, which are a function of the recorded statistics and that have different bounds for all possible decompositions of a high-dimensional physical system. Thus, it certifies the dimension of the system and has the new distinct feature of identifying whether the high-dimensional system is decomposable in terms of lower dimensional subsystems. To demonstrate the practicability of this technique, we used it to experimentally certify the generation of an irreducible 1024-dimensional photonic quantum state. Therefore, certifying that the state is not multipartite or encoded using noncoupled different degrees of freedom of a single photon. Our protocol should find applications in a broad class of modern quantum information experiments addressing the generation of high-dimensional quantum systems, where quantum tomography may become intractable.

Tunable entanglement distillation of spatially correlated down-converted photons

We report on a new technique for entanglement distillation of the bipartite continuous variable state of spatially correlated photons generated in the spontaneous parametric down-conversion process (SPDC), where tunable non-Gaussian operations are implemented and the post-processed entanglement is certified in real-time using a single-photon sensitive electron multiplying CCD (EMCCD) camera. The local operations are performed using non-Gaussian filters modulated into a programmable spatial light modulator and, by using the EMCCD camera for actively recording the probability distributions of the twin-photons, one has fine control of the Schmidt number of the distilled state. We show that even simple non-Gaussian filters can be finely tuned to a ∼67% net gain of the initial entanglement generated in the SPDC process.

Experimental Study of Optimal Measurements for Quantum State Tomography

Quantum tomography is a critically important tool to evaluate quantum hardware, making it essential to develop optimized measurement strategies that are both accurate and efficient. We compare a variety of strategies using nearly pure test states. Those that are informationally complete for all states are found to be accurate and reliable even in the presence of errors in the measurements themselves, while those designed to be complete only for pure states are far more efficient but highly sensitive to such errors. Our results highlight the unavoidable trade-offs inherent in quantum tomography.