Quantum States for Quantum Measurements

Maximilian Schlosshauer

Conventionally, unknown quantum states are characterized using quantum-state tomography based on strong or weak measurements carried out on an ensemble of identically prepared systems. By contrast, the use of protective measurements offers the possibility of determining quantum states from a series of weak, long measurements performed on a single system. Because the fidelity of a protectively measured quantum state is determined by the amount of state disturbance incurred during each protective measurement, it is crucial that the initial quantum state of the system is disturbed as little as possible. Here we show how to systematically minimize the state disturbance in the course of a protective measurement, thus enabling the maximization of the fidelity of the quantum-state measurement. Our approach is based on a careful tuning of the time dependence of the measurement interaction and is shown to be dramatically more effective in reducing the state disturbance than the previously considered strategy of weakening the measurement strength and increasing the measurement time. We describe a method for designing the measurement interaction such that the state disturbance exhibits polynomial decay to arbitrary order in the inverse measurement time $1/T$. We also show how one can achieve even faster, subexponential decay, and we find that it represents the smallest possible state disturbance in a protective measurement. In this way, our results show how to optimally measure the state of a single quantum system using protective measurements.

Dan Cristian Marinescu, Gabriela M. Marinescu

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano

Charbel Eid, Marco Túlio Quintino

The standard approach to quantum measurement discrimination is to perform the given unknown measurement on a probe state, possibly entangled with an auxiliary system, and make a decision based on the measurement outcome obtained. In this work, we go beyond the standard aforementioned scenarios by consider not only the classical measurement outcome of a measurement, but also its the post-measurement quantum state. More specifically, instead of considering only the positive-operator valued measure (POVM) operators, we consider their associated Lüders' instrument associated with them. We prove that, when the post-measurement quantum states are available, the task of discriminating two qubit projective measurements is equivalent to discriminating two copies of quantum states associated to each projector pair, extending previous results known for the case where probe states are separable. Then, we proceed by showing that the advantage of considering post-measurement states in measurement discrimination can be large. We formalise this claim by presenting a family of pairs of measurements where the ratio between the discrimination bias of the measurement discrimination task with and without post-measurement states can be arbitrarily large. This shows that, while the post-measurement state was neglected in most of the previous literature, its use can significantly improve the performance of quantum measurement discrimination.

Yiding Wang, Hui Liu, Tinggui Zhang

Quantum-state texture is a newly recognized quantum resource that has garnered attention with the advancement of quantum theory. In this work, we introduce several potential quantum-state texture measure schemes and check whether they satisfy the three fundamental conditions required for a valid quantum-state texture measure. Specifically, the measure induced by the ${l}_{1}$ norm serves as a vital tool for quantifying coherence, but we prove that it cannot be used to quantify quantum-state texture. Furthermore, we show that while relative entropy and robustness meet three fundamental conditions, they are not optimal for quantifying quantum-state texture. Fortunately, we still find that there are several measures that can be used as the measure standard of quantum-state texture. Among them, the trace distance measure and the geometric measure are two good measurement schemes. In addition, the two measures based on Uhlmann's fidelity are experimentally friendly and can serve as an ideal definition of quantum-state texture measures in nonequilibrium situations. All this research on quantum-state texture measure theory can enrich the resource theory framework of quantum-state texture.