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arXiv:1712.03213 · Physical Review A

Scalable quantum tomography with fidelity estimation

Jun Wang, Zhaoyu Han, Songbo Wang, Zeyang Li, Liang-Zhu Mu, Heng Fan, Lei Wang

Published Mar 16, 2020• 26 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a quantum tomography scheme for pure qudit systems which adopts a certain version of random basis measurements and a generative learning method, along with a built-in fidelity estimation approach to assess the reliability of the tomographic states. We prove the validity of the scheme theoretically, and we perform numerically simulated experiments on several target states that have compact matrix product state representation, demonstrating its efficiency and robustness. We find the number of replicas required by a fixed fidelity criterion grows only linearly as the system size scales up, which saturates a lower bound from information theory. Thus the scheme achieves the highest possible scalability that is crucial for practical quantum state tomography.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.032321

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We propose a quantum tomography scheme for pure qudit systems which adopts a certain version of random basis measurements and a generative learning method, along with a built-in fidelity estimation approach to assess the reliability of the tomographic states. We prove the validity of the scheme theoretically, and we perform numerically simulated experiments on several target states that have compact matrix product state representation, demonstrating its efficiency and robustness. We find the number of replicas required by a fixed fidelity criterion grows only linearly as the system size scales up, which saturates a lower bound from information theory. Thus the scheme achieves the highest possible scalability that is crucial for practical quantum state tomography.
We propose a quantum tomography scheme for pure states which adopts machine learning methods, along with a built-in fidelity estimation approach to assess the reliability of the tomographic state. We prove the validity of the scheme theoretically and perform numerically simulated experiments on several typical target quantum states such as W, cluster and dimer states. We find that the required number of measurements to meet the convergence criterion does not grow exponentially in the number of qubits, thus the scheme achieves high efficiency that is crucial for large-scale quantum states tomography in a laboratory.
Quantum tomography is the main method used to assess the quality of quantum information processing devices. However, the amount of resources needed for quantum tomography is exponential in the device size. Part of the problem is that tomography generates much more information than is usually sought. Taking a more targeted approach, we develop schemes that enable (i) estimating the fidelity of an experiment to a theoretical ideal description, (ii) learning which description within a reduced subset best matches the experimental data. Both these approaches yield a significant reduction in resources compared to tomography. In particular, we demonstrate that fidelity can be estimated from a number of simple experiments that is independent of the system size, removing an important roadblock for the experimental study of larger quantum information processing units.
Reconstructing quantum states from measurement data represents a formidable challenge in quantum information science, especially as system sizes grow beyond the reach of traditional tomography methods. While recent studies have explored quantum machine learning (QML) for quantum state tomography (QST), nearly all rely on idealized assumptions, such as direct access to the unknown quantum state as quantum data input, which are incompatible with current hardware constraints. In this work, we present a QML-based tomography protocol that operates entirely on classical measurement data and is fully executable on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Our approach employs a variational quantum circuit trained to reconstruct quantum states based solely on measurement outcomes. We test the method in simulation, achieving high-fidelity reconstructions of diverse quantum states, including GHZ states, spin chain ground states, and states generated by random circuits. The protocol is then validated on quantum hardware from IBM and IonQ. Additionally, we demonstrate accurate tomography is possible using incomplete measurement bases, a crucial step towards scaling up our protocol. Our results in various scenarios illustrate successful state reconstruction with fidelity reaching 90% or higher. To our knowledge, this is the first QML-based tomography scheme that has been implemented on real quantum processors using exclusively classical measurements. This work establishes the feasibility of QML-based tomography on current quantum platforms and offers a scalable pathway for practical quantum state reconstruction.
Characterizing quantum states is essential for validating quantum devices, yet conventional quantum state tomography becomes prohibitively expensive as system size grows. Direct tomography offers a distinct route by enabling selective access to individual complex density-matrix elements, with a particular advantage for sparse target states and some verification tasks. Here we introduce a direct quantum state tomography scheme combining strong-measurement estimation with a fan-out coupling architecture. It enables mutually commuting interactions between system qubits and a single meter qubit, thereby achieving constant circuit depth, independent of system size. Notably, the involutory fan-out coupling reduces to the identity under repetition, enabling straightforward noise scaling for quantum error mitigation. We experimentally validate the scheme on a superconducting quantum processor via the IBM Quantum Platform, demonstrating four-qubit state reconstruction and single-circuit GHZ-state fidelity estimation up to 20 qubits with error mitigation. Consistent results with standard tomography and improved efficiency establish our scheme as a promising approach to reconstructing full quantum states and scalable verification tasks.
Abstract Quantum state tomography is a cornerstone of quantum information technologies to characterize and benchmark quantum systems from measurement statistics. In this work, we present an infidelity-based least-squares estimator, which incorporates the state purity information and provides orders of magnitude higher tomography accuracy than previous ones. It is further enhanced with the randomized toolbox of direct fidelity estimation, making it applicable to large-scale quantum systems. We validate the proposed estimators through extensive experiments conducted on the IBM Qiskit simulator. The results also demonstrate that our estimator admits an O ( 1 / N ) infidelity scaling with Pauli sample size N for (nearly) pure states. Further, it enables high-precision pure-state tomography for systems of up to 25-qubit states, given some state priors. Our method provides a novel perspective on the union of underlying tomography technique and state properties estimation.
Reliable characterization of quantum states and quantum processes is central to the development of scalable quantum computing. Standard characterization techniques such as full quantum state tomography become rapidly impractical as system size increases. In this work we present two software-oriented fidelity estimation protocols that avoid full tomographic reconstruction while remaining experimentally relevant for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. The first protocol is direct fidelity estimation (DFE), where the fidelity between a target state and an experimentally prepared state is estimated from importance-sampled Pauli measurements. The second protocol is a survival-probability-based method that reconstructs fidelity from experimentally accessible moments of a noisy evolution and its approximate inverse, and is intrinsically robust against state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) errors. We discuss the theoretical basis of both approaches, analyze their noise sensitivity, and present numerical evidence on representative multiqubit states under depolarizing, dephasing, and amplitude-damping channels. For DFE we show that attenuation-aware correction improves robustness against measurement noise. For the survival-probability approach we show that an L2L_2L2​-optimized expansion substantially outperforms naive Taylor truncation in high-noise regimes.