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arXiv:2607.27719

Phase Retrieval in $\mathbb C^4$ Requires Exactly Eleven Measurements

Meng Huang, Jihun Kim

quant-phcs.ITmath.DGSubmitted Jul 30, 2026• Announced Jul 31, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Aug 31, 2026 (v3)
v1 · Jul 30, 2026v2 · Aug 28, 2026v3 · Aug 31, 2026
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Abstract

Determining the minimal number of intensity measurements required for phase retrieval in $\mathbb{C}^4$ has been a long-standing open problem. Prior to this work, the best-known results implied that this minimum was either $10$ or $11$. In this paper, we leverage characteristic classes and cohomology groups from differential topology to prove that no family of $10$ vectors in $\mathbb{C}^4$ possesses the phase retrieval property. Combining our lower bound with Vinzant's explicit eleven-vector construction establishes that the exact minimum is $11$. Our result yields a significant consequence for pure state quantum tomography, namely, a rank-one POVM on $\mathbb{C}^4$ requires exactly $11$ elements to be informationally complete for pure states. This further implies that three orthonormal bases are insufficient to uniquely distinguish all pure states in $\mathbb{C}^4$. Because four orthonormal bases are already known to be sufficient, we conclude that exactly four bases are required, thereby completely resolving the problem left in [C. Carmeli, T. Heinosaari, J. Schultz, A. Toigo, Eur. Phys. J. D].

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Phase Retrieval in C4\mathbb C^4C4 Requires Exactly Eleven Measurements
Determining the minimal number of intensity measurements required for phase retrieval in C4\mathbb{C}^4C4 has been a long-standing open problem. Prior to this work, the best-known results implied that this minimum was either 101010 or 111111. In this paper, we leverage characteristic classes and cohomology groups from differential topology to prove that no family of 101010 vectors in C4\mathbb{C}^4C4 possesses the phase retrieval property. Combining our lower bound with Vinzant's explicit eleven-vector construction establishes that the exact minimum is 111111. Our result yields a significant consequence for pure state quantum tomography, namely, a rank-one POVM on C4\mathbb{C}^4C4 requires exactly 111111 elements to be informationally complete for pure states. This further implies that three orthonormal bases are insufficient to uniquely distinguish all pure states in C4\mathbb{C}^4C4. Because four orthonormal bases are already known to be sufficient, we conclude that exactly four bases are required, thereby completely resolving the problem left in [C. Carmeli, T. Heinosaari, J. Schultz, A. Toigo, Eur. Phys. J. D].
Quantum state tomography seeks to reconstruct an unknown state from measurement statistics. A finite measurement (POVM) is \emph{pure-state informationally complete} (PSI-Complete) if the outcome probabilities determine any pure state up to a global phase. We study \emph{rank-one} POVMs that are minimally sufficient for this task. We call such a POVM \emph{vital} if it is PSI-Complete but every proper subcollection is not PSI-Complete. We prove sharp upper bounds on the size of vital rank-one POVMs in dimension nnn: the size is at most (n+12)\binom{n+1}{2}(2n+1​) over R\mathbb{R}R and at most n2n^{2}n2 over C\mathbb{C}C, and we give constructions that attain these bounds. In the real case, we further exhibit a connection to block designs: whenever w∣n(n−1)w \mid n(n-1)w∣n(n−1), an (n,w,w−1)(n,w,w-1)(n,w,w−1) design produces a vital rank-one POVM with n+n(n−1)/wn + n(n-1)/wn+n(n−1)/w outcomes. We provide explicit constructions for w=2,n−1w=2,n-1w=2,n−1, and nnn.
One of the fundamental questions in quantum information theory is to find how many measurement bases are required to obtain the full information of a quantum state. While a minimum of four measurement bases is typically required to determine an arbitrary pure state, we prove that for any states generated by finite-depth Clifford + T circuits, just two measurement bases are sufficient. More generally, we prove that two measurement bases are informationally complete for determining algebraic pure states whose state-vector elements represented in the computational basis are algebraic numbers. Since any pure state can be asymptotically approximated by a sequence of algebraic states with arbitrarily high precision, our scheme is referred to as asymptotically informationally complete for pure state tomography. Furthermore, existing works mostly construct the measurements using entangled bases. So far, the best result requires O(n)O(n)O(n) local measurement bases for nnn-qubit pure-state tomography. Here, we show that two measurement bases that involve polynomial elementary gates are sufficient for uniquely determining sparse algebraic states. Moreover, we prove that two local measurement bases, involving single-qubit local operations only, are informationally complete for certain algebraic states, such as GHZ-like and W-like states. Besides, our two-measurement-bases scheme remains valid for mixed states with certain types of noises. We numerically test the uniqueness of the reconstructed states under two (local) measurement bases with and without measurement and depolarising types of noise. Our scheme provides a theoretical guarantee for pure state tomography in the fault-tolerant quantum computing regime.
Abstract. We provide a detailed analysis of the question: how many measurement settings or outcomes are needed in order to identify a quantum system which is constrained by prior information? We show that if the prior information restricts the system to a set of lower dimensionality, then topological obstructions can increase the required number of outcomes by a factor of two over the number of real parameters needed to characterize the system. Conversely, we show that almost every measurement becomes informationally complete with respect to the constrained set if the number of outcomes exceeds twice the Minkowski dimension of the set. We apply the obtained results to determine the minimal number of outcomes of measurements which are informationally complete with respect to states with rank constraints. In particular, we show that 4d − 4 measurement outcomes (POVM elements) is enough in order to identify all pure states in a d-dimensional Hilbert space, and that the minimal number is at most 2 log2(d) smaller than this upper bound. 1.
We show that for any positive integer nnn, the maps x∈Cn↦{∣⟨x,zi⟩∣2}i=14n∈R4nx \in \mathbb{C}^n \mapsto \{\left|\langle x, z_i \rangle \right|^2\}_{i=1}^{4n} \in \mathbb{R}^{4n}x∈Cn↦{∣⟨x,zi​⟩∣2}i=14n​∈R4n, where ziz_izi​ are the columns of four n×nn\times nn×n unitary matrices, are generically injective modulo multiplication by a global phase factor, yielding a family of embeddings of CPn−1\mathbb{C}P^{n-1}CPn−1 into R4n−4\mathbb{R}^{4n-4}R4n−4. In particular, this implies that distribution measurements about a pure state with four generic full-rank observables are informationally complete, which is sharp for n≥6n \geq 6n≥6. To complement this information-theoretic study, we establish in a companion paper that the PhaseLift algorithm yields efficient phase retrieval from quadratic measurements with O(1)O(1)O(1) unitary matrices, with high probability, where the unitaries are iid according to Haar measure.
A long-standing problem in quantum mechanics is the minimum number of observables required for the characterization of unknown pure quantum states. The solution to this problem is especially important for the developing field of high-dimensional quantum information processing. In this work we demonstrate that any pure d-dimensional state is unambiguously reconstructed by measuring five observables, that is, via projective measurements onto the states of five orthonormal bases. Thus, in our method the total number of different measurement outcomes (5d) scales linearly with d. The state reconstruction is robust against experimental errors and requires simple postprocessing, regardless of d. We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme through the reconstruction of eight-dimensional quantum states, encoded in the momentum of single photons.
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.