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arXiv:1911.00277 · Optical Engineering

Estimating the precision for quantum process tomography

Evgeniy O. Kiktenko, Daria N. Kublikova, Aleksey K. Fedorov

Published Jan 10, 2020• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum tomography is a widely applicable tool for complete characterization of quantum states and processes. We develop a method for precision-guaranteed quantum process tomography. With the use of the Choi–Jamiołkowski isomorphism, we generalize the recently suggested extended norm minimization estimator for the case of quantum processes. Our estimator is based on the Hilbert–Schmidt distance for quantum processes. Specifically, we discuss the application of our method for characterizing quantum gates of a superconducting quantum processor in the framework of the IBM Q Experience.

DOI
10.1117/1.oe.59.6.061614

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Quantum tomography is a widely applicable tool for complete characterization of quantum states and processes. We develop a method for precision-guaranteed quantum process tomography. With the use of the Choi–Jamiołkowski isomorphism, we generalize the recently suggested extended norm minimization estimator for the case of quantum processes. Our estimator is based on the Hilbert–Schmidt distance for quantum processes. Specifically, we discuss the application of our method for characterizing quantum gates of a superconducting quantum processor in the framework of the IBM Q Experience.
Quantum state tomography is currently the standard tool for verifying that a state prepared in the lab is close to an ideal target state, but up to now there have been no rigorous methods for evaluating the precision of the state preparation in tomographic experiments. We propose a new estimator for quantum state tomography, and prove that the (always physical) estimates will be close to the true prepared state with a high probability. We derive an explicit formula for evaluating how high the probability is for an arbitrary finite-dimensional system and explicitly give the one- and two-qubit cases as examples. This formula applies for any informationally complete sets of measurements, arbitrary finite number of data sets, and general loss functions including the infidelity, the Hilbert-Schmidt, and the trace distances. Using the formula, we can evaluate not only the difference between the estimated and prepared states, but also the difference between the prepared and target states. This is the first result directly applicable to the problem of evaluating the precision of estimation and preparation in quantum tomographic experiments.
Alternatively to the full reconstruction of an unknown quantum process, the so-called selective and efficient quantum process tomography (SEQPT) allows estimating, individually and up to the required accuracy, a given element of the matrix that describes such an operation with a polynomial amount of resources. The implementation of this protocol has been carried out with success to characterize the evolution of a quantum system that is well described by a trace-preserving quantum map. Here, we deal with a more general type of quantum process that does not preserve the trace of the input quantum state, which naturally arises in the presence of imperfect devices and system-environment interactions, in the context of quantum information science or quantum dynamics control. In that case, we show with the aid of a priori information on the losses structure of the quantum channel that the SEQPT reconstruction can be adapted to reconstruct the non-trace-preserving map. We explicitly describe how to implement the reconstruction in an arbitrary Hilbert space of finite dimension ddd. The method is experimentally verified on a superconducting quantum processor provided by IBM Quantum services, by estimating several non-trace-preserving quantum processes in dimensions up to d=6d=6d=6. Our results show that it is possible to efficiently reconstruct non-trace-preserving processes, with high precision, and with significantly higher fidelity than when the process is assumed to be trace preserving.
Quantum process tomography (QPT) protocols are often designed by lifting quantum state tomography (QST) protocols through the Choi-Jamiolkowski isomorphism, at the cost of an extra step enforcing the trace-preserving (TP) constraint. Existing approaches fall into two classes. The folklore partial normalization, which sandwiches the density estimate between inverse square roots of its input marginal, has a closed form but is used as a heuristic, its only analyses being asymptotic and losing a factor polynomial in the dimension. Projection-based methods are principled but have no closed forms and scale poorly with dimension. We resolve this dichotomy by showing that the partial normalization is the exact projection onto the Choi states of quantum channels in fidelity (equivalently in Bures or purified distance). Consequently, any QST algorithm with guarantees in fidelity lifts to a QPT algorithm that inherits its sample complexity, through a single closed-form congruence that preserves the Choi rank and is computed in Kraus form without any eigendecomposition of Choi dimension. We lift two single-copy protocols and prove that the non-adaptive one (Fidelity Projected Least Squares) recovers the Choi rank and reaches infidelity ε\varepsilonε from a number of channel uses proportional to 1/ε1/\varepsilon1/ε. Numerically, for channels of low Choi rank, it improves on the state-of-the-art projected least squares in accuracy, and by orders of magnitude in the time and memory of the TP-regularization step and of the returned estimate.
Alternatively to the full reconstruction of an unknown quantum process, the so-called selective and efficient quantum process tomography (SEQPT) allows estimating, individually and up to the required accuracy, a given element of the matrix that describes such an operation with a polynomial amount of resources. The implementation of this protocol has been carried out with success to characterize the evolution of a quantum system that is well described by a trace preserving quantum map. Here, we deal with a more general type of quantum process that does not preserve the trace of the input quantum state, which naturally arises in the presence of imperfect devices and system-environment interactions, in the context of quantum information science or quantum dynamics control. In that case, we show that with the aid of {\it a priori} information on the losses structure of the quantum channel, the SEQPT reconstruction can be adapted to reconstruct the non-trace-preserving map. We explicitly describe how to implement the reconstruction in an arbitrary Hilbert space of finite dimension ddd. The method is experimentally verified on a superconducting quantum processor of the IBM Quantum services, by estimating several non trace-preserving quantum processes in dimensions up to d=6d=6d=6. Our results show that it is possible to efficiently reconstruct non trace-preserving processes, with high precision, and with significantly higher fidelity than when the process is assumed to be trace-preserving.
Abstract In the present work, we propose a generalization of the confidence polytopes approach for quantum state tomography (QST) to the case of quantum process tomography (QPT). Our approach allows obtaining a confidence region in the polytope form for a Choi matrix of an unknown quantum channel based on the measurement results of the corresponding QPT experiment. The method uses the improved version of the expression for confidence levels for the case of several positive operator-valued measures. We then demonstrate how confidence polytopes can be employed for calculating confidence intervals for affine functions of quantum states (Choi matrices), such as fidelities and observables mean values, which are used both in QST and QPT settings. As we propose, this problem can be efficiently solved using linear programming tools. We also study the performance and scalability of the developed approach on the basis of simulation and experimental data collected using IBM cloud quantum processor.
Coherent-state quantum process tomography (csQPT) is a method for completely characterizing a quantum-optical ‘black box’ by probing it with coherent states and carrying out homodyne measurements on the output (Lobino et al 2008 Science 322 563). We present a technique for csQPT that is fully based on statistical inference, in particular, quantum expectation-maximization. The method relies on the Jamiolkowski isomorphism and iteratively reconstructs the process tensor in the Fock basis directly from the experimental data. This approach permits incorporation of a priori constraints into the reconstruction procedure, thereby guaranteeing that the resulting process tensor is physically consistent. Furthermore, our method is easier to implement and requires a narrower range of coherent states than its predecessors. We test its feasibility using simulations on several experimentally relevant processes.