The analysed in this paper new class of $s$-tight IC measurements contains both morphophoric measurements, preserving the geometry of the states space, and tight IC measurements, introduced nearly 20 years ago by Scott in the quantum case as optimal for the task of linear quantum tomography. By looking at the mathematical side of these classes we discover their common feature, which is also preserved in the broader class of $s$-tight IC measurements: a particularly elegant form of the formula that can be seen as the generalised form of the Urgleichung known from the QBist approach to quantum theory. In particular, the tight IC measurements are identified as the ones for which this generalised Urgleichung takes an exceptionally simple form.
Beyond morphophoricity: s-tight IC measurements in geometric generalised probabilistic theories
The analysed in this paper new class of s-tight IC measurements contains both morphophoric measurements, preserving the geometry of the states space, and tight IC measurements, introduced nearly 20 years ago by Scott in the quantum case as optimal for the task of linear quantum tomography. By looking at the mathematical side of these classes we discover their common feature, which is also preserved in the broader class of s-tight IC measurements: a particularly elegant form of the formula that can be seen as the generalised form of the Urgleichung known from the QBist approach to quantum theory. In particular, the tight IC measurements are identified as the ones for which this generalised Urgleichung takes an exceptionally simple form.
The reconstruction of unknown quantum states via minimal informationally complete measurements (MICs) is a cornerstone of quantum tomography. Although the statistical properties of these measurements are well-understood, their geometric structure has remained elusive. In this work, we establish a correspondence between the class of minimal s-tight informationally complete measurements, encompassing, among others, tight IC and morphophoric measurements, and the classical geometry of orthocentric simplices. In particular, we prove a three-way equivalence: a MIC is s-tight if and only if its measurement vectors, upon suitable rescaling, form the vertices of an acute orthocentric simplex with the orthocentre at the origin, and such simplices are precisely the homothetically self-dual ones. This geometric manifestation of operational ''tightness'' provides a bridge between the physical world and Euclidean geometry. Furthermore, the s-tight class is fully characterised by its measurement directions: the angles between them must be obtuse and satisfy a cross-ratio condition. We determine the space of admissible direction configurations: modulo rotations, every such configuration is encoded by a single probability vector, the ''skeleton'' of the measurement, together with an orientation class, so that the moduli space of s-tight MIC directions is Δd+1∘×{±1}. Conversely, every acute orthocentric simplex with the orthocentre at the origin can be anchored in the state space, generating a class of minimal s-tight IC measurements that contains exactly one tight IC measurement up to overall rescaling.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is a fundamental task in quantum information science that aims to reconstruct unknown quantum states from measurement data. However, the exponential growth of Hilbert-space dimension with system size makes full tomography of general quantum states statistically and computationally prohibitive. This challenge has motivated extensive research on structured quantum state tomography, where prior structure, such as low-rankness, tensor-network representations, shallow quantum circuits, and neural quantum states, can substantially reduce the effective degrees of freedom and enable scalable recovery. In this review, we provide a unified perspective on QST for structured quantum states through three closely related themes: compact state representations, measurement design, and computational algorithms. After reviewing common models for structured quantum states, we survey existing work on geometric preservation properties of measurement frameworks, ranging from informationally complete POVMs to randomized measurements, and their implications for sample complexity. On the algorithmic side, we review optimization methods for reconstructing structured quantum states from empirical measurements. By connecting QST with broader principles from compressive sensing, matrix sensing, and structured inverse problems, this survey highlights common theoretical foundations underlying sample complexity, measurement efficiency, and scalable recovery.
We introduce a class of informationally complete positive-operator-valued measures which are, in analogy with a tight frame, ‘as close as possible’ to orthonormal bases for the space of quantum states. These measures are distinguished by an exceptionally simple state-reconstruction formula which allows ‘painless’ quantum state tomography. Complete sets of mutually unbiased bases and symmetric informationally complete positive-operator-valued measures are both members of this class, the latter being the unique minimal rank-one members. Recast as ensembles of pure quantum states, the rank-one members are in fact equivalent to weighted 2-designs in complex projective space. These measures are shown to be optimal for quantum cloning and linear quantum state tomography.
Informationally complete (IC) measurements are a useful class of measurements, as their outcome statistics uniquely determine an unknown quantum state. Hence, they are important for certain tasks such as quantum state tomography, quantum process tomography, etc. In this work, we study the quantification of informational completeness for arbitrary quantum measurements by introducing and characterizing a faithful measure for it. We explicitly evaluate the informational completeness of qubit symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurements and show that it is an upper bound for all qubit minimal informationally complete measurements. Furthermore, by introducing a faithful measure, we try to quantify and characterize the ability of an arbitrary quantum channel to preserve the informational completeness of any IC measurement when the channel acts on it in the Heisenberg picture. We call this measure informational completeness-preservability (IC preservability) of quantum channels. After studying its properties, we establish its relation to another quantity, namely, the absolute output coherence of a quantum channel, which quantifies the minimum amount of coherence (w.r.t. an arbitrary incoherent basis) that can always be obtained from the output of that channel. Finally, we illustrate our results with an example from light-matter interaction scenarios. Thus, in this work, not only do we try to provide a quantitative framework for studying both the informational completeness of quantum measurements and the ability of quantum channels to preserve it, but we also try to offer key insight into the conceptual relation between informational completeness and quantum coherence.
We introduce a class of informationally complete positive-operator-valued measures which are, in analogy with a tight frame, "as close as possible" to orthonormal bases for the space of general quantum states. Complete sets of mutually unbiased bases and symmetric informationally complete positive-operator-valued measures are both members of this class, the latter being the unique minimal members. Such measures share a particularly simple state reconstruction formula, allowing painless quantum state tomography, and are shown to be optimal for quantum cloning.
QBism recasts quantum theory as a normative framework for an agent's probability assignments, with the Born rule taking the form of a consistency condition known as the Urgleichung. Motivated by this perspective, qplex theories provide a broader class of probabilistic models in which the sets of valid states and measurements are constrained by QBist-inspired geometric conditions. While qplexes have been extensively studied for single systems, their implications for bipartite correlations remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate bipartite correlations in qplex theories by expressing joint expectation values as inner products between suitably defined C-vectors. This geometric formulation allows Bell-type inequalities to be studied as optimization problems over qplex-compatible probability assignments. We first analyze the CHSH scenario and show that the shared inner-product structure of the C-vectors restricts the maximal value to the Tsirelson bound 22. We then turn to the three-outcome CGLMP inequality I2233 and find that the same qplex-derived norm and inner-product constraints allow a violation of up to ≤2+2(3)/3≈3.1547 versus the quantum maximum of ≈2.8729, thereby exhibiting super-quantum correlations. These results show that qplex geometry captures enough structure to reproduce an important quantum bound in the two-outcome case, but not enough to recover the full set of quantum correlation constraints. The analysis therefore suggests that additional principles are needed to complete the QBist reconstruction of quantum theory.