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arXiv:2101.05556 · Physical Review A

Direct measurement of density-matrix elements using a phase-shifting technique

Tianfeng Feng, Changliang Ren, Xiaoqi Zhou

Published Oct 4, 2021• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A direct measurement protocol allows reconstructing specific elements of the density matrix of a quantum state without using quantum state tomography. However, the direct measurement protocols to date are primarily based on weak or strong measurements with an ancillary pointer, which interacts with the investigated system to extract information about the specified elements. Here, we present a direct measurement scheme based on phase-shifting operations which do not need ancillary pointers. In this method, estimates of at most six expectation values of projective observables suffice to determine any specific element of an unknown quantum density matrix. A concrete quantum circuit to implement this direct measurement protocol for multiqubit states is provided, which is composed of just single-qubit gates and two multiqubit controlled-phase gates. This scheme is also extended for the direct measurement of the density matrix of continuous-variable quantum states. Our method can be used in quantum information applications where only partial information about the quantum state needs to be extracted, for example, problems such as entanglement witnessing, fidelity estimation of quantum systems, and quantum coherence estimation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.104.042403

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A direct measurement protocol allows reconstructing specific elements of the density matrix of a quantum state without using quantum state tomography. However, the direct measurement protocols to date are primarily based on weak or strong measurements with an ancillary pointer, which interacts with the investigated system to extract information about the specified elements. Here, we present a direct measurement scheme based on phase-shifting operations which do not need ancillary pointers. In this method, estimates of at most six expectation values of projective observables suffice to determine any specific element of an unknown quantum density matrix. A concrete quantum circuit to implement this direct measurement protocol for multiqubit states is provided, which is composed of just single-qubit gates and two multiqubit controlled-phase gates. This scheme is also extended for the direct measurement of the density matrix of continuous-variable quantum states. Our method can be used in quantum information applications where only partial information about the quantum state needs to be extracted, for example, problems such as entanglement witnessing, fidelity estimation of quantum systems, and quantum coherence estimation.
A direct measurement protocol allows reconstructing specific elements of the density matrix of a quantum state without using quantum state tomography. Until now, most direct measurement protocols have relied on ancillary pointers, which add complexity and are not always easy to implement experimentally. In this paper, we experimentally validate a direct measurement protocol requiring no ancillary pointers that calculates the value of a specific element of a quantum state's density matrix using only six projection measurements. We prepare path-encoded arbitrary four-dimensional quantum states on a silicon-based quantum photonic chip and measure the density-matrix elements of the four-dimensional quantum states using this protocol, with experimental results deviating from ideal values by an average of only $0.010\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.004$. This approach has the potential to be applied to quantum information applications where only partial information about the quantum state needs to be extracted, for example, problems such as entanglement witnessing, fidelity estimation of quantum systems, and quantum coherence estimation.
New techniques based on weak measurements have recently been introduced to the field of quantum state reconstruction. Some of them allow the direct measurement of each matrix element of an unknown density operator and need only O(d) different operations, compared to d^{2} linearly independent projectors in the case of standard quantum state tomography, for the reconstruction of an arbitrary mixed state. However, due to the weakness of these couplings, these protocols are approximated and prone to large statistical errors. We propose a method which is similar to the weak measurement protocols but works regardless of the coupling strength: our protocol is not approximated and thus improves the accuracy and precision of the results with respect to weak measurement schemes. We experimentally apply it to the polarization state of single photons and compare the results to those of preexisting methods for different values of the coupling strength. Our results show that our method outperforms previous proposals in terms of accuracy and statistical errors.
Abstract In the field of quantum information, the acquisition of information for unknown quantum states is very important. When we only need to obtain specific elements of a state density matrix, the traditional quantum state tomography will become very complicated, because it requires a global quantum state reconstruction. Direct measurement of the quantum state allows us to obtain arbitrary specific matrix elements of the quantum state without state reconstruction, so direct measurement schemes have obtained extensive attention. Recently, some direct measurement schemes based on weak values have been proposed, but extra auxiliary states in these schemes are necessary and it will increase the complexity of the practical experiment. Meanwhile, the post-selection process in the scheme will reduce the utilization of resources. In order to avoid these disadvantages, a direct measurement scheme without auxiliary states is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, we achieve the direct measurement of quantum states by using quantum circuits, then we extend it to the measurement of general multi-particle states and complete the error analysis. Finally, when we take into account the dephasing of the quantum states, we modify the circuits and the modified circuits still work for the dephasing case.
One drawback of conventional quantum state tomography is that it does not readily provide access to single density matrix elements since it requires a global reconstruction. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a scheme that can be used to directly measure individual density matrix elements of general quantum states. The scheme relies on measuring a sequence of three observables, each complementary to the last. The first two measurements are made weak to minimize the disturbance they cause to the state, while the final measurement is strong. We perform this joint measurement on polarized photons in pure and mixed states to directly measure their density matrix. The weak measurements are achieved using two walk-off crystals, each inducing a polarization-dependent spatial shift that couples the spatial and polarization degrees of freedom of the photons. This direct measurement method provides an operational meaning to the density matrix and promises to be especially useful for large dimensional states.
Density matrix, which characterizes a quantum state, plays an important role in quantum mechanics. Recently, a method which can directly measure the elements of a density matrix was proposed. Compared with the conventional quantum state tomography which is widely used to reconstruct the density matrix, this measurement method has the advantages of directness and simplicity. However, this direct measurement method relies on an extra pointer space. The addition of this extra pointer can increase the complexity of an experiment. In this paper, we first review previous work on direct measurement, then we propose a scheme to directly measure the density matrix based on δ-quench, which is also a direct measurement method but needs no additional pointer. This proposal reduces the complexity of the measuring system and further simplifies the measurement. We propose two schemes to realize this δ-quench measurement, then analyse their superiorities in different situations of measurement. An experiment to measure photon's density matrix is also designed.
We present a protocol that allows the estimation of any density matrix element for continuous-variable quantum states, without resorting to the complete reconstruction of the full density matrix. The algorithm adaptatively discretizes the state and then, by resorting to controlled squeezing and translation operations, which are the main requirements for this algorithm, measures the density matrix element value. Furthermore, we show how this method can be used to achieve full quantum state tomography for continuous-variable quantum systems, alongside numerical simulations.