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arXiv:2606.03964

Informational completeness of qubit measurements and IC preservability of qubit channels: Characterization and Quantification

Jatin Ghai, Arindam Mitra

quant-phSubmitted Jun 2, 2026• Announced Jun 3, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jun 2, 2026v2 · Jun 17, 2026
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Abstract

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 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 finally 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. 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.

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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 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 finally 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. 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.
Abstract The physical problem behind informationally complete (IC) measurements is determining an unknown state statistically by measurement outcomes, known as state tomography. It is of central importance in quantum information processing such as channel estimating, device testing, quantum key distribution, etc. However, constructing such measurements with good properties is a long‐standing problem. In this work, projective realizations of IC measurements are investigated. Conditions of informational completeness are presented with proofs first. Then the projective realizations of IC measurements, including proposing the first general construction of minimal projective IC measurements (MPICM) in no prime power dimensional systems, as well as determining an unknown state in via a single projective measurement with some kinds of optimalities in a larger system, are investigated. Finally, The results can be extended to local state tomography. Some discussions on employing several kinds of optimalities are also provided.
The accessible information quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted from an ensemble of quantum states. Analogously, the informational power quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted by a quantum measurement. For both quantities, we provide upper and lower bounds that depend only on the dimension of the system, and we prove their tightness. In the case of symmetric informationally complete (SIC) ensembles and measurements, stronger bounds are provided and their tightness proved for qubits and qutrits. From our upper bounds, we notice, perhaps surprisingly, that the statistics generated by SIC ensembles or measurements in arbitrary dimension, though optimal for tomographic purposes, in fact never contain more than just one bit of information, the rest being constituted by completely random bits. On the other hand, from our lower bounds, we obtain an explicit strategy beating the so-called pretty-good one for the extraction of mutual information in the case of SIC ensembles and measurements.
Set coherence is a quantum resource for a set of states that characterizes whether a collection of quantum states contains coherence, namely whether these states fail to be simultaneously incoherent in a common basis. In this work, we show that the free operations of set coherence are common commutativity-preserving quantum channels, from which we then establish an axiomatic framework for set-coherence measure (SCM). Within this framework, we investigate the robustness based measures deduced by taking, respectively, the average, maximum, and sum of the single-state robustnesses over a common reference basis, where the first two were previously introduced in the literature and we check here whether they satisfy our SCM axioms. Consequently, we show that the averaged robustness is an SCM but it is neither unified nor complete, the maximal robustness is a unified SCM but is neither complete nor strongly superadditive, whereas the sum robustness is a complete SCM. Furthermore, we propose several classes of SCMs based on pairwise commutators. We show that the Schatten ppp-norm based SCMs are complete and strongly superadditive. We also find that the universal fourth-order Bargmann gap measure proposed in the literature is a complete and strongly superadditive quantifier of set coherence. Finally, we discuss the operational meaning of the SCM in the context of optimal approximate quantum broadcasting, and show that the amount of set coherence can closely reflect the performance of this task.
Preserving entanglement is a crucial dynamical process for entanglement-based quantum computation and quantum-information processes, such as one-way quantum computing and quantum key distribution. However, the problem of quantifying the ability of an experimental process to preserve two-qubit entanglement in experimentally feasible ways is not well understood. Accordingly, herein, we consider the use of two measures, namely composition and robustness, for quantitatively characterizing the ability of a process to preserve entanglement, referred to henceforth as entanglement preservability. A fidelity benchmark is additionally derived to identify the ability of a process to preserve entanglement. We show that the measures and introduced benchmark are experimentally feasible and require only local measurements on single qubits and preparations of separable states. Moreover, they are applicable to all physical processes that can be described using the general theory of quantum operations, e.g., qubit dynamics in photonic and superconducting systems. Our method extends the existing tools for analyzing channels, e.g., channel resource theory, to quantify entanglement preservability for non-trace-preserving quantum processes. The results are of significant interest for applications in quantum-information processing in which entanglement preservation is required.
We introduce a new kind of quantum measurement that is defined to be symmetric in the sense of uniform Fisher information across a set of parameters that uniquely represent pure quantum states in the neighborhood of a fiducial pure state. The measurement is locally informationally complete-i.e., it uniquely determines these parameters, as opposed to distinguishing two arbitrary quantum states-and it is maximal in the sense of a multiparameter quantum Cramér-Rao bound. For a d-dimensional quantum system, requiring only local informational completeness allows us to reduce the number of outcomes of the measurement from a minimum close to but below 4d-3, for the usual notion of global pure-state informational completeness, to 2d-1.