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Fortschritte der Physik

Programmable quantum measurement device that approximates all projective measurements on a qubit

Jaromı́r Fiurášek, Miloslav Dušek, Radim Filip

Published Feb 26, 2003• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract A “universal” quantum measurement device is proposed. It can approximate any projective measurement on a qubit. The measurement basis is selected by the quantum state of a “program register''. The device is optimized with respect to maximal average fidelity. A contra‐intuitive result is that if two qubits in the same state are used as a program the average fidelity is higher than if the second program qubit is in the respective orthogonal state.

DOI
10.1002/prop.200310011

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Abstract A “universal” quantum measurement device is proposed. It can approximate any projective measurement on a qubit. The measurement basis is selected by the quantum state of a “program register''. The device is optimized with respect to maximal average fidelity. A contra‐intuitive result is that if two qubits in the same state are used as a program the average fidelity is higher than if the second program qubit is in the respective orthogonal state.
We propose a quantum device that can approximate any projective measurement on a qubit-a quantum "multimeter." The desired measurement basis is selected by the quantum state of a "program register." Two different kinds of programs are considered and in both cases the device is optimized with respect to maximal average fidelity (assuming uniform distribution of measurement bases). Quantum multimeters exhibiting the covariance property are introduced and an optimal covariant multimeter with a single-qubit program register is found. Possible experimental realization of the simplest proposed device is presented.
We propose quantum devices that can realize probabilistically different projective measurements on a qubit. The desired measurement basis is selected by the quantum state of a program register. First we analyze the phase-covariant multimeters for a large class of program states and then the universal multimeters for a special choice of program. In both cases we start with deterministic but error-prone devices and then proceed to devices that never make a mistake but from time to time give an inconclusive result. These multimeters are optimized (for a given type of program) with respect to the minimum probability of an inconclusive result. This concept is further generalized to multimeters that minimize the error rate for a given probability of an inconclusive result (or vice versa). Finally, we propose a generalization for qudits.
Programmable photonic quantum processors face a critical challenge: despite significant advances in quantum state preparation and manipulation, measurements remain limited to projective techniques. Here, we demonstrate a programmable measurement processor that overcomes this limitation by enabling arbitrary quantum measurements within a scalable circuit framework. Our large-scale integrated photonic architecture achieves precise coherent control of ancillary quantum systems, realizing a universal four-dimensional quantum measurement device. We benchmark the processor by performing measurement tomography on 100 randomly selected measurements, achieving an average fidelity of 97.7%. The processor's performance exceeds the theoretical limits of projective measurements in three key quantum information tasks: state discrimination (with 23 times lower error), state estimation (with 10.6% higher fidelity), and randomness generation (with 37% more randomness yield), demonstrating its high operational quality. This work establishes a fully programmable quantum measurement processor, advancing the development of universal quantum operations for photonic quantum information processing by providing the key missing component.
We review some partial results for two strictly related problems. The first problem consists in finding the optimal joint unitary transformation on system and ancilla which is the most efficient in programming any desired channel on the system by changing the state of the ancilla. In this respect we present a solution for dimension two for both system and ancilla. The second problem consists in finding the optimal universal programmable detector, namely a device that can be tuned to perform any desired measurement on a given quantum system, by changing the state of an ancilla. With a finite dimension for the ancilla only approximate universal programmability is possible, with minimal dimension increasing function versus the precision of the approximation. We show that one can achieve a dimension growing polynomially versus the precision, and even linearly in specific cases.
We propose a ``programmable'' quantum device that is able to perform a specific generalized measurement from a certain set of measurements depending on a quantum state of a ``program register.'' In particular, we study a situation when the programmable measurement device serves for the unambiguous discrimination between nonorthogonal states. The particular pair of states that can be unambiguously discriminated is specified by the state of a program qubit. The probability of successful discrimination is not optimal for all admissible pairs. However, for some subsets it can be very close to the optimal value.
We present a scheme for a universal device which can be programed by quantum states to approximate a chosen projective measurement to a given precision. Our scheme can be viewed as an extension of the swap test to the instance where one state is supplied many times. As such, it has many potential applications given the variety of quantum information tasks which make use of the swap test. In particular, we show that our scheme is optimal for state discrimination under the one-sided error requirement, and optimally approximates any projective measurement. Furthermore, we propose a practical implementation of our scheme with passive linear optics, which involves a simple interferometer composed only of balanced beam splitters.