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arXiv:2505.04607

Experimental demonstration of a multi-particle collective measurement for optimal quantum state estimation

Arman Mansouri, Kyle M. Jordan, Raphael A. Abrahão, Jeff S. Lundeen

Published May 7, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate a two-particle collective measurement proposed as the optimal solution to a quantum state estimation game. Our results suggest that, in practice, the collective measurement strategy is at least as good as the best local approach, and it achieves a higher average fidelity when accounting for systematic errors. This photonic implementation uses a recently developed universal two-photon projective measurement based on Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, polarization-dependent loss, and unitary operations. We compare the performance to the case where the entangling component of the measurement is suppressed. We further apply the collective measurement to quantum state tomography, observing a near-optimal scaling of the infidelity with the total number of samples.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2505.04607

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We experimentally demonstrate a two-particle collective measurement proposed as the optimal solution to a quantum state estimation game. Our results suggest that, in practice, the collective measurement strategy is at least as good as the best local approach, and it achieves a higher average fidelity when accounting for systematic errors. This photonic implementation uses a recently developed universal two-photon projective measurement based on Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, polarization-dependent loss, and unitary operations. We compare the performance to the case where the entangling component of the measurement is suppressed. We further apply the collective measurement to quantum state tomography, observing a near-optimal scaling of the infidelity with the total number of samples.
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Quantum science and technology have seen rapid progress in recent decades, finding applications in computation, information processing, communication, and sensing. Accurate characterization and manipulation of quantum states is essential to the successful implementation of these applications. Moreover, optimal quantum state estimation is closely related to fundamental questions, such as limits on how fast information can be extracted about quantum systems. In this thesis, we present several contributions to efficiently estimating and transforming quantum states. We discuss optimal quantum state estimation, both in the regime of few available quantum systems as well as the asymptotic regime. We numerically investigate how assuming a pure-state can affect the performance of tomographic methods, and where adaptive quantum state tomography is in fact advantageous. While collective measurements have been formally considered as optimal solutions to various problems in quantum information, their implementation has been largely neglected due to experimental challenges. We present a proof-of-concept experiment realizing Massar and Popescu's optimal collective measurement for quantum state estimation, utilizing two-photon interference and polarization-dependent loss to achieve non-maximally entangled state projections. We demonstrate that collective strategies can outperform the best separable measurements. Furthermore, we introduce and experimentally implement a fast and automated optical polarization compensation scheme using liquid crystal variable retarders and rotating quarter-wave plate tomography. Desired accuracy thresholds can be achieved within a few compensation steps. Finally, we use a matrix-model approach to investigate the realization of spatial unitary transformations via sequences of thin phase gratings and free-space propagation. We numerically demonstrate that the grating parameters and propagation distances can be optimized to achieve various two-beam and three-beam unitary transformations, such as Pauli gates and the discrete Fourier transform. Through experimental and numerical approaches, this thesis offers new perspectives on methods for quantum state estimation and unitary transformation.
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Quantum-mechanical incompatibility, which precludes the simultaneous precise measurement of non-commuting observables, imposes fundamental limits on the rate at which classical information can be extracted. While the potential to surpass these limits using entangling collective measurements has been explored for two parameters, the regime of three or more parameters remains largely unexplored despite its fundamental and technological importance. Here, we investigate the three-parameter trade-off relations for estimating the Bloch vector components of a qubit, comparing conventional individual measurements with entangling collective measurements. We theoretically derive and experimentally implement optimal collective measurements on two identically prepared qubits using a programmable photonic circuit. Our experimental results demonstrate a clear violation of the entanglement-free trade-off relation -- by an average of 16 standard deviations -- achieving a tomography precision beyond the reach of any individual measurement scheme. This work directly confirms that optimal collective measurements can surpass the fundamental quantum limits of individual schemes in a three-parameter setting -- thereby deepening our understanding of quantum uncertainty relations beyond the two-parameter regime and providing a clear strategy to overcome the precision trade-offs imposed by quantum incompatibility.
When used in quantum state estimation, projections onto mutually unbiased bases have the ability to maximize information extraction per measurement and to minimize redundancy. We present the first experimental demonstration of quantum state tomography of two-qubit polarization states to take advantage of mutually unbiased bases. We demonstrate improved state estimation as compared to standard measurement strategies and discuss how this can be understood from the structure of the measurements we use. We experimentally compared our method to the standard state estimation method for three different states and observe that the infidelity was up to 1.84 ± 0.06 times lower by using our technique than it was by using standard state estimation methods.