Characterizing quantum states is essential for validating quantum devices, yet conventional quantum state tomography becomes prohibitively expensive as system size grows. Direct tomography offers a distinct route by enabling selective access to individual complex density-matrix elements, with a particular advantage for sparse target states and some verification tasks. Here we introduce a direct quantum state tomography scheme combining strong-measurement estimation with a fan-out coupling architecture. It enables mutually commuting interactions between system qubits and a single meter qubit, thereby achieving constant circuit depth, independent of system size. Notably, the involutory fan-out coupling reduces to the identity under repetition, enabling straightforward noise scaling for quantum error mitigation. We experimentally validate the scheme on a superconducting quantum processor via the IBM Quantum Platform, demonstrating four-qubit state reconstruction and single-circuit GHZ-state fidelity estimation up to 20 qubits with error mitigation. Consistent results with standard tomography and improved efficiency establish our scheme as a promising approach to reconstructing full quantum states and scalable verification tasks.
Characterizing quantum states is essential for validating quantum devices, yet conventional quantum state tomography becomes prohibitively expensive as system size grows. Direct tomography offers a distinct route by enabling selective access to individual complex density-matrix elements, with a particular advantage for sparse target states and some verification tasks. Here we introduce a direct quantum state tomography scheme combining strong-measurement estimation with a fan-out coupling architecture. It enables mutually commuting interactions between system qubits and a single meter qubit, thereby achieving constant circuit depth, independent of system size. Notably, the involutory fan-out coupling reduces to the identity under repetition, enabling straightforward noise scaling for quantum error mitigation. We experimentally validate the scheme on a superconducting quantum processor via the IBM Quantum Platform, demonstrating four-qubit state reconstruction and single-circuit GHZ-state fidelity estimation up to 20 qubits with error mitigation. Consistent results with standard tomography and improved efficiency establish our scheme as a promising approach to reconstructing full quantum states and scalable verification tasks.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is a crucial tool for characterizing quantum states. However, performing full QST becomes impractical for reconstructing multiqubit density matrices since datasets and computational costs grow exponentially with qubit number. To bypass full QST, we introduce selective and efficient QST (SEEQST)—a method that enables efficient estimation of multiple selected elements of an arbitrary multiqubit density matrix. We show that any N -qubit density matrix can be partitioned into 2 N disjoint subsets, each containing 2 N elements. With SEEQST, any such subset can be accurately estimated from just two experiments with only single-qubit measurements. The complexity for estimating any subset remains constant regardless of Hilbert-space dimension, so, if desired, SEEQST can reconstruct the full density matrix, using 2 N + 1 − 1 experiments, where standard methods would use 3 N experiments. We provide a circuit decomposition for the SEEQST experiments, demonstrating that their maximum circuit depth scales logarithmically with N assuming all-to-all connectivity.
Quantum state tomography (QST) via local measurements on reduced density matrices (LQST) is a promising approach but becomes impractical for large systems. To tackle this challenge, we developed an efficient quantum state tomography method inspired by quantum overlapping tomography [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 100401 (2020)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.124.100401], which utilizes parallel measurements (PQST). In contrast to LQST, PQST significantly reduces the number of measurements and offers more robustness against shot noise. Experimentally, we demonstrate the feasibility of PQST in a treelike superconducting qubit chip by designing high-efficiency circuits, preparing W states, ground states of Hamiltonians, and random states, and then reconstructing these density matrices using full quantum state tomography (FQST), LQST, and PQST. Our results show that PQST reduces measurement cost, achieving fidelities of 98.68% and 95.07% after measuring 75 and 99 observables for six-qubit and nine-qubit W states, respectively. Furthermore, the reconstruction of the largest density matrix of the 12-qubit W state is achieved with the similarity of 89.23% after just measuring 243 parallel observables, while 3^{12}=531 441 complete observables are needed for FQST. Consequently, PQST will be a useful tool for future tasks such as the reconstruction, characterization, benchmarking, and properties learning of states.
Quantum computers solve ever more complex tasks using steadily growing system sizes.Characterizing these quantum systems is vital, yet becoming increasingly challenging.The gold-standard method for this task is quantum state tomography (QST), capable of fully reconstructing a quantum state without prior knowledge.The measurement and classical computing costs, however, increase exponentially with the number of constituents (e.g., qubits)-a daunting bottleneck given the scale of existing and nearterm quantum devices.Here, we demonstrate a scalable and practical QST approach that only uses a single measurement setting, namely symmetric informationally complete (SIC) positive operator-valued measures (POVMs).We implement these nonorthogonal measurements on an ion trap quantum processor by utilizing additional energy levels within each ion-without requiring ancillary ions to assist in measurements.More precisely, we locally map the SIC POVM to orthogonal states embedded in a higher-dimensional system, which we read out using repeated in-sequence detections, thereby providing full tomographic information in every shot.Combining this SIC tomography with the recently developed randomized measurement toolbox ("classical shadows") proves to be a powerful combination.SIC tomography alleviates the need for choosing measurement settings at random ("derandomization"), while classical shadows enable the estimation of arbitrary polynomial functions of the density matrix orders of magnitudes faster than standard methods.The latter enables in-depth entanglement characterization, which we experimentally showcase on a five-qubit absolutely maximally entangled state.Moreover, the fact that the full tomography information is available in every shot enables online QST in real time (i.e., while the experiment is running).We demonstrate this on an eight-qubit entangled state (which has 2 8 • 2 8 -1 = 65 535 degrees of freedom), as well as for fast state identification.All in all, these features single out SIC-based classical shadow estimation as a highly scalable and convenient tool for quantum state characterization.
Quantum state tomography is a fundamental technique for characterizing quantum systems, but its scalability remains a significant challenge. This paper investigates an efficient alternative using classical shadows to reconstruct a Bell state with high fidelity. Classical shadows provide a compressed representation of a quantum state using randomized measurements, reducing the measurement complexity compared to full quantum tomography when full state reconstruction is not required. We employed a quantum circuit to generate a Bell state and utilize 1000 snapshots to construct its classical shadow. The reconstructed density matrix is evaluated using fidelity and norm difference metrics against the ideal Bell state. Our analysis demonstrates that as the number of snapshots increases, the fidelity of reconstruction stabilizes around 0.98-1.0, with the norm difference decreasing accordingly. The results also confirm the convergence of reconstructed states towards the ideal Bell state, highlighting the efficiency and accuracy of classical shadows in quantum state estimation. Shallow shadow tomography uses shallow random circuits to estimate global quantum state properties on noisy hardware. By combining low-depth entangling gates with randomized measurements and noise-aware postprocessing, it reduces sample complexity compared to Pauli shadows while remaining experimentally feasible. Recent experiments on superconducting processors confirmed up to fivefold measurement savings.
We introduce a direct estimation framework for reconstructing multiple density matrix elements of an unknown quantum state using classical shadow tomography. Traditional direct measurement protocols (DMPs), while effective for individual elements, suffer from poor scalability due to post-selection losses and the need for element-specific measurement configurations. In contrast, our method, DMP-ST, leverages random Clifford or biased mutually unbiased basis measurements to enable global estimation: a single dataset suffices to estimate arbitrary off-diagonal entries with high accuracy. We prove that estimating K off-diagonal matrix elements up to additive error ε requires only O(logK/ε2) samples, achieving exponential improvement over conventional DMPs. The number of required measurement configurations can also be exponentially reduced for large K. When extended to full state tomography, DMP-ST attains trace distance error ≤ε with sample complexity O(d3logd/ε2), which is closed to the optimal scaling for single-copy measurements. Moreover, biased MUB measurements reduce sample complexity by a constant factor than random Clifford measurements. This work provides both theoretical guarantees and explicit protocols for efficient, entrywise quantum state reconstruction. It significantly advances the practicality of direct tomography, especially for high-dimensional systems and near-term quantum platforms.
Reconstructing quantum states from measurement data represents a formidable challenge in quantum information science, especially as system sizes grow beyond the reach of traditional tomography methods. While recent studies have explored quantum machine learning (QML) for quantum state tomography (QST), nearly all rely on idealized assumptions, such as direct access to the unknown quantum state as quantum data input, which are incompatible with current hardware constraints. In this work, we present a QML-based tomography protocol that operates entirely on classical measurement data and is fully executable on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Our approach employs a variational quantum circuit trained to reconstruct quantum states based solely on measurement outcomes. We test the method in simulation, achieving high-fidelity reconstructions of diverse quantum states, including GHZ states, spin chain ground states, and states generated by random circuits. The protocol is then validated on quantum hardware from IBM and IonQ. Additionally, we demonstrate accurate tomography is possible using incomplete measurement bases, a crucial step towards scaling up our protocol. Our results in various scenarios illustrate successful state reconstruction with fidelity reaching 90% or higher. To our knowledge, this is the first QML-based tomography scheme that has been implemented on real quantum processors using exclusively classical measurements. This work establishes the feasibility of QML-based tomography on current quantum platforms and offers a scalable pathway for practical quantum state reconstruction.