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arXiv:0706.0394 · Physical Review A

How state preparation can affect a quantum experiment: Quantum process tomography for open systems

Aik-meng Kuah, Kavan Kishore Modi, César A. Rodríguez-Rosario, E. C. G. Sudarshan

Published Oct 17, 2007• 48 citations
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Abstract

We study the effects of the preparation of input states in a quantum tomography experiment. We show that maps arising from a quantum process tomography experiment (called process maps) differ from the well-known dynamical maps. The difference between the two is due to the preparation procedure that is necessary for any quantum experiment. We study two preparation procedures: stochastic preparation and preparation by measurements. The stochastic preparation procedure yields process maps that are linear, while the preparations using von Neumann measurements lead to nonlinear processes and can only be consistently described by a bilinear process map. A process tomography recipe is derived for preparation by measurement for qubits. The difference between the two methods is analyzed in terms of a quantum process tomography experiment. A verification protocol is proposed to differentiate between linear processes and bilinear processes. We also emphasize that the preparation procedure will have a nontrivial effect for any quantum experiment in which the system of interest interacts with its environment.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.76.042113

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We study the effects of the preparation of input states in a quantum tomography experiment. We show that maps arising from a quantum process tomography experiment (called process maps) differ from the well-known dynamical maps. The difference between the two is due to the preparation procedure that is necessary for any quantum experiment. We study two preparation procedures: stochastic preparation and preparation by measurements. The stochastic preparation procedure yields process maps that are linear, while the preparations using von Neumann measurements lead to nonlinear processes and can only be consistently described by a bilinear process map. A process tomography recipe is derived for preparation by measurement for qubits. The difference between the two methods is analyzed in terms of a quantum process tomography experiment. A verification protocol is proposed to differentiate between linear processes and bilinear processes. We also emphasize that the preparation procedure will have a nontrivial effect for any quantum experiment in which the system of interest interacts with its environment.
It was recently pointed out how differences in preparation procedures for quantum experiments can lead to nontrivial differences in the results of the experiment. The differences arise from the initial correlations between the system and the environment. Therefore, any quantum experiment that is prone to influences from the environment must be prepared carefully. We study quantum-process tomography in light of this. We suggest several experimental setups, where preparation of the initial state plays a role in the final outcome of the experiment. By studying the linearity and the positivity of the resulting maps, the experimenter can determine the nature of the initial correlations between the system and the environment.
In recent years there has been a significant development of the dynamical map formalism for initially correlated states of a system and its environment. Based on some of these results, we study quantum process tomography for initially correlated states of the system and the environment. This is beyond the usual assumption that the state of the system and the environment are initially uncorrelated. Since quantum process tomography is an experimental procedure, we wind up having to study the role of preparation of input states for open quantum experiments. We work out a theory for the general preparation procedure, and study two preparation procedures in detail. In specific, we study the stochastic preparation procedure and the projective preparation procedure and apply them to quantum process tomography. The two preparation procedures describe the ways to uncorrelate.....
We address the problem of quantum process tomography with the preparators producing states correlated with the environmental degrees of freedom that play role in the system-environment interactions. We discuss the physical situations, in which the dynamics is described by nonlinear, or noncompletely positive transformations. In particular, we show that arbitrary mapping ϱin→ϱout\varrho_{\rm in}\to\varrho_{\rm out}ϱin​→ϱout​ can be realized by using appropriate set of preparators and applying the unitary operation SWAP. The experimental ``realization'' of perfect NOT operation is presented. We address the problem of the verification of the compatibility of the preparator devices with the estimating process. The evolution map describing the dynamics in arbitrary time interval is known not to be completely positive, but still linear. The tomography and general properties of these maps are discussed.
For a quantum system interacting with its environment, the role of state preparation is nontrivial. The reason is that before the state preparation procedure, the system and the environment are correlated. Consequently, the state preparation procedure (which acts on the system) indirectly influences the state of the environment depending on the state preparation. In this paper, we use an experimentally realizable model describing a collection of N two-level atoms coupled to a common environment to investigate the influence of the state preparation procedure. We show that the dynamical map describing the evolution of the open quantum system can depend appreciably on the state preparation procedure. Moreover, this effect can be enhanced by increasing N. Our results should be useful for quantum control and quantum tomography.
The structure of the set of density matrices, its linear transformations, generalized linear measurements, and entanglement are studied. The set of density matrices is shown to be a convex and stratified set with simplex and group symmetries. Generalized measurements for density matrices are shown to be reducible to one unitary transformation and one von Neumann measurement carried out with an ancillary system of fixed size. Linear maps of density matrices are considered and the volume of the set of maps is derived. Positive but not completely positive maps are studied in consideration of obtaining a test for entanglement in density matrices. Using the Jamiolkowski representation and Schmidt decomposition of the map eigen matrices, several properties of these maps are shown. An algebraic approach to constructing these positive but not completely positive maps is partially formulated. The positivity of the linear map describing the evolution of an open system and its dependence on the initialized to a zero-discord state, the evolution is shown to be given by a completely positive map. In quantum process tomography, the results obtained from a open system that is initially prepared using von Neumann measurements is shown to be described by a bi-linear map, not a linear map. A method for quantum process tomography is derived for qubit bi-linear maps. The difference between preparing states for an experiment by measurement and by stochastic process is analyzed, and it is shown that the two different methods will give fundamentally different outcomes.
Quantum process tomography (QPT) methods aim at identifying, i.e., estimating, a given quantum process. QPT is a major quantum information processing tool, since it especially allows one to characterize the actual behavior of quantum gates, which are the building blocks of quantum computers. However, usual QPT procedures are complicated, since they set several constraints on the quantum states used as inputs of the process to be characterized. In this paper, we extend QPT so as to avoid two such constraints. On the one hand, usual QPT methods require one to know, hence to very precisely control (i.e., prepare), the specific quantum states used as inputs of the considered quantum process, which is cumbersome. We therefore propose a blind, or unsupervised, extension of QPT (i.e., BQPT), which means that this approach uses input quantum states whose values are unknown and arbitrary, except that they are requested to meet some general known properties (and this approach exploits the output states of the considered quantum process). On the other hand, usual QPT methods require one to be able to prepare many copies of the same (known) input state, which is constraining. In contrast, we propose ``single-preparation BQPT methods'' (SBQPT) , i.e., methods which can operate with only one instance of each considered input state. These two concepts are here illustrated with practical (S)BQPT methods which are numerically validated, in the case when (i) random pure states are used as inputs and their required properties are especially related to the statistical independence of the random variables that define them and (ii) the considered quantum process is based on cylindrical-symmetry Heisenberg spin coupling. As a benchmark, we moreover introduce nonblind QPT methods dedicated to the considered Heisenberg process, we analyze their theoretical behavior (this requires the tools developed in this paper for random input states), and we numerically test their sensitivity to systematic and nonsystematic errors, which are most likely to occur in practice. This shows that, even for very low preparation errors (especially systematic ones), these nonblind QPT methods yield much lower performance than our SBQPT methods. Our blind and single-preparation QPT concepts may be extended, e.g., to a much wider class of processes and to SBQPT methods based on other quantum state properties, as outlined in this paper.