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arXiv:1112.4492 · New Journal of Physics

Self-calibrating quantum state tomography

Agata M. Brańczyk, Dylan H. Mahler, L A Rozema, A Darabi, Aephraim M. Steinberg, D F V James

Published Aug 1, 2012• 44 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a technique for performing quantum state tomography (QST) on multiple-qubit states despite incomplete knowledge about the unitary operations used to change the measurement basis. Given unitary operations with unknown rotation angles, our method can be used to reconstruct the density matrix of the state up to local rotations as well as recover the magnitude of the unknown rotation angle. We demonstrate high-fidelity self-calibrating tomography on polarization-encoded one- and two-photon states. The unknown unitary operations are realized in two ways: using a birefringent polymer sheet—an inexpensive smartphone screen protector—or alternatively a liquid crystal wave plate with a tuneable retardance. We explore how our technique may be adapted for QST of systems such as biological molecules where the magnitude and orientation of the transition dipole moment is not known with high accuracy.

DOI
10.1088/1367-2630/14/8/085003

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We introduce and experimentally demonstrate a technique for performing quantum state tomography (QST) on multiple-qubit states despite incomplete knowledge about the unitary operations used to change the measurement basis. Given unitary operations with unknown rotation angles, our method can be used to reconstruct the density matrix of the state up to local rotations as well as recover the magnitude of the unknown rotation angle. We demonstrate high-fidelity self-calibrating tomography on polarization-encoded one- and two-photon states. The unknown unitary operations are realized in two ways: using a birefringent polymer sheet—an inexpensive smartphone screen protector—or alternatively a liquid crystal wave plate with a tuneable retardance. We explore how our technique may be adapted for QST of systems such as biological molecules where the magnitude and orientation of the transition dipole moment is not known with high accuracy.
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Quantum state tomography relies on the ability to perform well-characterized unitary operations, which are not always available. This places restrictions on which physical systems can be characterized using such techniques. We develop a formalism that circumvents the requirement for well-characterized unitary operations by treating unknown parameters in the state and unitary process on the same footing, thereby simultaneously performing state and partial process tomography. Our formalism is generalized to ddd-level systems, and we provide a specific example for a V\mathsf{V}V-type three-level atomic system whose transition dipole moments are not known. We show that it is always possible to retrieve not only the unknown state but also the process parameters, except for a set of zero measure in the state-parameter space.
Quantum state tomography (QST) estimates an unknown quantum state from a measurement process typically performed on identical copies of the target state and plays a core role in characterizing quantum information systems. However, because quantum measurement outcomes are probabilistic, QST methods often require many shots per basis to achieve high-fidelity estimates, which hinders scalability to many-qubit applications and slows the transmission of quantum information. A more efficient procedure is therefore required for modern-day quantum operations in quantum computing, communications, and sensing. We address this need with an adaptive QST approach that measures a single-qubit state in a wide set of bases. We include bases beyond the Pauli triad {X,Y,Z} by leveraging the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of quantum mechanics, increasing the likelihood of producing highly polarized measurement outcomes and finding an optimally informative basis. With this basis, the state can be identified with fewer measurements by focusing on directions that most reduce uncertainty of the state. In addition to theoretical innovation in [9], we experimentally verify in a simplified photonic realization using 13 bases that having many more available measurement bases than the Pauli triad benefits QST. This engineering implementation demonstrates that adaptive QST is both efficient in performance and practical to implement.
Quantum state tomography (QST) aims at reconstructing the state of a quantum system. However, in conventional QST, the number of measurements scales exponentially with the number of qubits. Here, we propose a QST protocol, in which the introduction of a threshold allows one to drastically reduce the number of measurements required for the reconstruction of the state density matrix without compromising the result accuracy. In addition, one can also use the same approach to reconstruct an approximated density matrix tailoring the number of measurements on the available resources. We experimentally demonstrate this protocol by performing the tomography of states up to 7 qubits. We show that our approach can lead to results in agreement with those obtained by QST even when the number of measurements is reduced by more than two orders of magnitude.
We extend the idea of using a incompletely characterized process to do quantum state tomography by including the possibility that the process itself is not unitary. We study a to level atom whose dipole moment is unknown and that undergoes spontaneous emission and is irradiated by a laser whose phase and intensity can be controlled at will. We show that by using five different parameter settings of the electric field of the laser it is possible two reconstruct the state, and obtain the unknown spontaneous emission rate and dipole moment of the atom.