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arXiv:1311.1516 · Physical Review A

Optimization of quantum state tomography in the presence of experimental constraints

Mohammadreza Mohammadi, Agata M. Brańczyk

Published Jan 16, 2014• 7 citations
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Abstract

In the absence of experimental constraints, optimal measurement schemes for quantum state tomography are well understood. We consider the scenario where the experimenter doesn't have arbitrary freedom to construct their measurement set, and may therefore not be able to implement a known optimal scheme. We introduce a simple procedure for minimizing the uncertainty in the reconstructed quantum state for an arbitrary tomographic scheme. We do this by defining a figure of merit based on the equally weighted variance of the measurement statistics. This figure of merit is straightforwardly based on the singular value decomposition of the measurement matrix, making it well suited for optimization.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.012113

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In the absence of experimental constraints, optimal measurement schemes for quantum state tomography are well understood. We consider the scenario where the experimenter doesn't have arbitrary freedom to construct their measurement set, and may therefore not be able to implement a known optimal scheme. We introduce a simple procedure for minimizing the uncertainty in the reconstructed quantum state for an arbitrary tomographic scheme. We do this by defining a figure of merit based on the equally weighted variance of the measurement statistics. This figure of merit is straightforwardly based on the singular value decomposition of the measurement matrix, making it well suited for optimization.
Practical quantum state tomography is usually performed by carrying out repeated measurements on many copies of a given state. The accuracy of the reconstruction depends strongly on the dimensionality of the system and the number of copies used for the measurements. We investigate the accuracy of an experimental implementation of a minimal and optimal tomography scheme for one- and two-qubit states encoded in the polarization of photons. A suitable statistical model for the attainable accuracy is introduced.
Quantum state tomography is an indispensable but costly part of many quantum experiments. Typically, it requires measurements to be carried out in a number of different settings on a fixed experimental setup. The collected data are often informationally overcomplete, with the amount of information redundancy depending on the particular set of measurement settings chosen. This raises a question about how one should optimally take data so that the number of measurement settings necessary can be reduced. Here, we cast this problem in terms of integer programming. For a given experimental setup, standard integer-programming algorithms allow us to find the minimum set of readout operations that can realize a target tomographic task. We apply the method to certain basic and practical state-tomographic problems in nuclear-magnetic-resonance experimental systems. The results show that considerably fewer readout operations can be found using our technique than by using the previous greedy search strategy. Therefore, our method could be helpful for simplifying measurement schemes to minimize the experimental effort.
Given an experimental setup and a fixed number of measurements, how should one take data to optimally reconstruct the state of a quantum system? The problem of optimal experiment design (OED) for quantum state tomography was first broached by Kosut et al. [R. Kosut, I. Walmsley, and H. Rabitz, e-print arXiv:quant-ph/0411093 (2004)]. Here we provide efficient numerical algorithms for finding the optimal design, and analytic results for the case of `minimal tomography'. We also introduce the average OED, which is independent of the state to be reconstructed, and the optimal design for tomography (ODT), which minimizes tomographic bias. Monte Carlo simulations confirm the utility of our results for qubits. Finally, we adapt our approach to deal with constrained techniques such as maximum-likelihood estimation. We find that these are less amenable to optimization than cruder reconstruction methods, such as linear inversion.
We establish methods for quantum state tomography based on compressed sensing. These methods are specialized for quantum states that are fairly pure, and they offer a significant performance improvement on large quantum systems. In particular, they are able to reconstruct an unknown density matrix of dimension d and rank r using O(rdlog²d) measurement settings, compared to standard methods that require d² settings. Our methods have several features that make them amenable to experimental implementation: they require only simple Pauli measurements, use fast convex optimization, are stable against noise, and can be applied to states that are only approximately low rank. The acquired data can be used to certify that the state is indeed close to pure, so no a priori assumptions are needed.
Abstract The quantum state associated to an unknown experimental preparation procedure can be determined by performing quantum state tomography. If the statistical uncertainty in the data dominates over other experimental errors, then a tomographic reconstruction procedure must express this uncertainty. A rigorous way to accomplish this is via statistical confidence regions (CRs) in state space. Naturally, the size of this region decreases when increasing the number of samples, but it also depends critically on the construction method of the region. We compare recent methods for constructing CRs as well as a reference method based on a Gaussian approximation. For the comparison, we propose an operational measure with the finding, that there is a significant difference between methods, but which method is preferable can depend on the details of the state preparation scenario.