We give a rigorous treatment on the foundation of the first order asymptotic theory of quantum estimation, with tractable and reasonable regularity conditions. Different from past works, we do not use Fisher information nor MLE, and an optimal estimator is constructed based on locally unbiased estimators. Also, we treat state estimation by local operations and classical communications (LOCC), and estimation of quantum operations.
We give a rigorous treatment on the foundation of the first order asymptotic theory of quantum estimation, with tractable and reasonable regularity conditions. Different from past works, we do not use Fisher information nor MLE, and an optimal estimator is constructed based on locally unbiased estimators. Also, we treat state estimation by local operations and classical communications (LOCC), and estimation of quantum operations.
The subject of this thesis, quantum estimation theory, is inspired by recent developments, both practical and theoretical, in the new field of quantum information and computation. The main task of quantum estimation theory, the subject of this thesis, is that given many identical copies of an unknown quantum system one wants to guess or estimate what the system is. This is done by performing an measurement and analyzing the data obtained from it.
A quantum state is represented by a density matrix. In some cases one does not need to know the whole density matrix, sometimes a partial characterization is enough. Chapter 2 of this thesis is about optimally estimating the spectrum, i.e. the eigenvalues, of a density matrix. This is useful, for example, for estimating the entanglement of a bipartite pure state. The results of chapter 2 tell us that one can optimally estimate bipartite entanglement with LOCC measurements on one of the two parties.
Unitary operations transform density matrices to density matrices. They are the gates of quantum information processing. Suppose one has one such unitary operation but one does not know what it does. In order to characterize it one needs to know how it transforms any input state. In order to know how a particular state is transformed, one can prepare that state, feed it to the unitary many times, and measure the output. One state is, of course, not enough. It turns out that the unitary can be completely characterized with a finite set of states, this is known as quantum process tomography. Unfortunately, in many cases it is difficult to have available in the lab all the input states needed to perform quantum process tomography. It is here where entanglement comes to the rescue. One pair of maximally entangled qubits, where one of them is used as input for the unitary gate and the other is left untouched, is sufficient. All the information about the unknown gate is contained in the joint output state. This is the problem treated in chapter 3. Now the output state needs to be measured. Again, one could measure the two qubits separately (LOCC) or jointly (collective measurement). Is there anything to gain by performing joint measurements? The answer is yes, optimal collective measurements are at least 3 times more accurate than any LOCC measurement.
Chapter 4 treats the problem of estimating commuting unitary gates. There it is shown that this extra information makes it unnecessary to use an entangled input state and to use collective measurements at the output.
In chapters 3 and 4 it is assumed that only one copy of the unitary gate is available. If, however, more than one copy (say N ) are available at the same time one could use an N-fold entangled state as input. If no entanglement is used, classical statistics tells us that the error of the estimation is proportional to 1/√N. In the literature, it has been shown that by using an entangled state in the input one can achieve an error proportional to 1/N. However, this has been shown only for qubit gates. In chapter 5 important steps are taken in the direction of showing the same thing for a general unitary gate, but this remains an open problem.
Informationally complete measurements form the foundation of universal quantum state reconstruction, while quantum parameter estimation is based on the local structure of the manifold of quantum states. Here we establish a general link between these two aspects, in the context of a single informationally complete measurement, by employing a suitably adapted operator frame theory. In particular, we bound the ratio between the classical and quantum Fisher information in terms of the spectral decomposition of the associated frame operator, and connect these bounds to the optimal and least optimal directions for parameter encoding. The geometric and operational characterization of information extraction thus obtained reveals the fundamental tradeoff imposed by informational completeness on local quantum parameter estimation.
The problem of optimally estimating an unknown unitary quantum operation with the aid of entanglement is addressed. The idea is to prepare an entangled pair, apply the unknown unitary to one of the two parts, and then measure the joint output state. This measurement could be an entangled one or it could be separable (e.g., measurements which can be implemented with local operations and classical communication or LOCC). A comparison is made between these possibilities and it is shown that by using nonseparable measurements one can improve the accuracy of the estimation by a factor of 2(d+1)/d where d is the dimension of the Hilbert space on which U acts.
We determine the exact worst-direction Fisher-information cost of using a parameter-independent readout to estimate an unknown qubit direction at known Bloch-vector length η. Every fixed-local architecture, including recorded classical randomization, heterogeneous single-copy measurements, and arbitrary outcome spaces, reduces exactly to a zero-barycenter probability measure on the Bloch ball. For every full-rank qubit and every trace-balanced spectral Fisher loss, the resulting minimax problem is rigid: the unique optimal aggregate design is the spin-coherent Haar positive-operator-valued measure (POVM). For N copies, inverse-Fisher A loss has the exact value 2/[Nf(η)], where $
f(η)=
\frac{2η-(1-η^2)\log[(1+η)/(1-η)]}{4η}$. This uniqueness has an immediate finite-readout consequence. No finite-support measurement attains the unrestricted mixed-state optimum, while at the smallest globally regular support the tetrahedral symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurement is uniquely A- and D-minimax, with exact worst-direction values. Relaxing the fixed-readout constraint separates the asymptotic resources: one-way local operations and classical communication (LOCC), unrestricted LOCC, and separable measurements have A-loss coefficient 4/η2, whereas collective measurements attain 2(1+η)/η2. We further classify the rigidity conditions for unequal contrasts and show that Haar uniqueness survives at the nonregular pure-state endpoint.
Recently, entanglement concentration was explicitly shown to be irreversible. However, it is still not clear what kind of states can be reversibly converted in the asymptotic setting by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) when neither the initial nor the target state is maximally entangled. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition for the reversibility of LOCC conversions between two bipartite pure entangled states in the asymptotic setting. In addition, we show that conversion can be achieved perfectly with only local unitary operation under such condition except for special cases. Interestingly, our result implies that an error-free reversible conversion is asymptotically possible even between states whose copies can never be locally unitarily equivalent with any finite numbers of copies, although such a conversion is impossible in the finite setting. In fact, we show such an example. Moreover, we establish how to overcome the irreversibility of LOCC conversion in two ways. As for the first method, we evaluate how many copies of the initial state are to be lost to overcome the irreversibility of LOCC conversion. The second method is to add a supplementary state appropriately, which also works for local unitary conversion unlike the first method. Especially, for the qubit system, any nonmaximally pure entangled state can be a universal resource for the asymptotic reversibility when copies of the state are sufficiently many. More interestingly, our analysis implies that far-from-maximally entangled states can be better than nearly maximally entangled states as this type of resource. This fact brings new insight to the resource theory of state conversion.