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arXiv:2601.16570

Certification of quantum properties with imperfect measurements

Leonardo Zambrano, Teodor Parella-Dilmé, Antonio Acín, Donato Farina

quant-phSubmitted Jan 23, 2026• Announced Jan 26, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The accurate characterization of quantum systems is essential for the advancement of quantum technologies. In particular, certifying convex functions of quantum states plays a central role in many applications. We present a certification method for experimentally prepared quantum states that accounts for both shot noise and measurement imperfections in the data-acquisition stage. Building upon previous work, our method extends confidence regions to accommodate imperfect control over measurements. The values of the functions can then be bounded using convex optimization techniques. We provide explicit prescriptions for quantifying the noise contribution from finite statistics and for estimating the effect of measurement imperfections. By jointly incorporating statistical and systematic errors, the method yields a robust certification framework for quantum experiments.

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The accurate characterization of quantum systems is essential for the advancement of quantum technologies. In particular, certifying convex functions of quantum states plays a central role in many applications. We present a certification method for experimentally prepared quantum states that accounts for both shot noise and measurement imperfections in the data-acquisition stage. Building upon previous work, our method extends confidence regions to accommodate imperfect control over measurements. The values of the functions can then be bounded using convex optimization techniques. We provide explicit prescriptions for quantifying the noise contribution from finite statistics and for estimating the effect of measurement imperfections. By jointly incorporating statistical and systematic errors, the method yields a robust certification framework for quantum experiments.
Abstract The accurate characterization of quantum systems is essential for the advancement of quantum technologies. In particular, certifying convex functions of quantum states plays a central role in many applications. We present a certification method for experimentally prepared quantum states that accounts for both shot noise and measurement imperfections in the data-acquisition stage. Building upon previous work, our method extends confidence regions to accommodate imperfect control over measurements. The values of the functions can then be bounded using convex optimization techniques. We provide explicit prescriptions for quantifying the noise contribution from finite statistics and for estimating the effect of measurement imperfections. By jointly incorporating statistical and systematic errors, the method yields a robust certification framework for quantum experiments.
Ergotropy, the maximum work extractable from a quantum system, is a central resource in quantum physics. Computing ergotropy is well established when the system state is fully known, but its estimation under partial information remains an open problem. Here we introduce a general certification framework that lower bounds ergotropy using only the expectation values of a limited set of arbitrary observables. The method naturally applies in the finite-statistics regime, yielding confidence-certified bounds that explicitly incorporate shot noise. We benchmark our approach on both synthetic data and experimental measurements from an IBM quantum processor. This establishes a robust and experimentally accessible tool for certifying extractable work in realistic quantum settings.
Convex functions of quantum states play a key role in quantum physics, with examples ranging from Bell inequalities to von Neumann entropy. However, in experimental scenarios, direct measurements of these functions are often impractical. We address this issue by introducing two methods for determining rigorous confidence bounds for convex functions based on informationally incomplete measurements. Our approach outperforms existing protocols by providing tighter bounds for a fixed confidence level and number of measurements. We evaluate the performance of our methods using both numerical and experimental data. Our findings demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, paving the way for improved quantum state certification in real-world applications.
Standard quantum verification and certification protocols often assume that experimental sources emit independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) states. In realistic scenarios, however, temporal drift, memory effects, feedback, and correlated noise can violate this assumption, causing standard analyses to underestimate uncertainty and overestimate device performance. Here, we introduce a general framework for quantum verification and certification in which the state produced in each round may depend arbitrarily on the preceding experimental history. Our method provides rigorous confidence intervals for observable expectation values averaged over the experimental trajectory. The framework covers both full verification, in which every state is measured, and spot-checking certification, in which a randomly selected subset is tested to certify the average observable value of the complementary, remaining systems. We apply the framework to importance-sampled Pauli measurements for direct fidelity estimation, energy estimation, and entanglement witnessing, and to classical shadows, allowing multiple observables to be certified simultaneously from the same test data. We illustrate the framework numerically and demonstrate it experimentally through Bell-state certification on a quantum processor.
Preparing and certifying bound entangled states in the laboratory is an intrinsically hard task, due to both the fact that they typically form narrow regions in state space, and that a certificate requires a tomographic reconstruction of the density matrix. Indeed, the previous experiments that have reported the preparation of a bound entangled state relied on such tomographic reconstruction techniques. However, the reliability of these results crucially depends on the extra assumption of an unbiased reconstruction. We propose an alternative method for certifying the bound entangled character of a quantum state that leads to a rigorous claim within a desired statistical significance, while bypassing a full reconstruction of the state. The method is comprised by a search for bound entangled states that are robust for experimental verification, and a hypothesis test tailored for the detection of bound entanglement that is naturally equipped with a measure of statistical significance. We apply our method to families of states of 3×3 and 4×4 systems, and find that the experimental certification of bound entangled states is well within reach.
Determining the fundamental limits of nonlinear functionals of quantum measurement statistics is a crucial yet generally intractable nonconvex optimization problem. We introduce a generic support-function-based outer-approximation framework for solving concave-minimization (or convex-maximization) problems over the quantum state space. By mapping the problem onto a reduced Z\mathcal{Z}Z space, we characterize the exact quantum boundary through supporting half space derived from the largest eigenvalues of effective observables. This yields an effective method that produces tight bounds for general measurements in finite-dimensional quantum systems with preassigned numerical precision. As an initial application, we recover the exact variance-based uncertainty relations of [PRL \textbf{119}, 170404 (2017)] and efficiently compute optimal entropic uncertainty relations (EURs). Our results reveal that standard analytical and majorization-based EUR bounds are fundamentally loose for generic measurements, and we show that the resulting exact bounds directly enhance quantum steering detection under asymmetric settings. We further apply the framework to determine the maximal athermality resource certifiable from a restricted measurement scenario. Our method thus provides a universal computational tool for exploring the boundaries of quantum state space and the limits of quantum resources.