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Physical Review A

Finding optimal measurements with inconclusive results using the problem of minimum error discrimination

Kenji Nakahira, Tsuyoshi Sasaki Usuda, Kentaro Kato

Published Feb 24, 2015• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose an approach for finding an optimal measurement for quantum state discrimination that maximizes the probability of correct detection with a fixed rate of inconclusive results. In our approach, we obtain the optimal measurement by solving the problem of finding a measurement that maximizes the weighted sum of the probability of correct detection and that of inconclusive results. We show that this problem can be reduced to the widely studied problem of finding a minimum error measurement for a certain state set, which maximizes the probability of correct detection without inconclusive results. As an application of our approach, we show how to solve the problem of finding an optimal measurement for qubit states with a fixed rate of inconclusive results.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.022331

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We propose an approach for finding an optimal measurement for quantum state discrimination that maximizes the probability of correct detection with a fixed rate of inconclusive results. In our approach, we obtain the optimal measurement by solving the problem of finding a measurement that maximizes the weighted sum of the probability of correct detection and that of inconclusive results. We show that this problem can be reduced to the widely studied problem of finding a minimum error measurement for a certain state set, which maximizes the probability of correct detection without inconclusive results. As an application of our approach, we show how to solve the problem of finding an optimal measurement for qubit states with a fixed rate of inconclusive results.
We study an optimum measurement for quantum state discrimination, which maximizes the probability of correct results when the probability of inconclusive results is fixed at a given value. The measurement describes minimum-error discrimination if this value is zero, while under certain conditions it corresponds to optimized maximum-confidence discrimination, or to optimum unambiguous discrimination, respectively, when the fixed value reaches a definite minimum. Using operator conditions that determine the optimum measurement, we derive analytical solutions for the discrimination of two mixed qubit states, including the case of two pure states occurring with arbitrary prior probabilities, and for the discrimination of NNN symmetric states, both pure and mixed. We also consider a case where the given density operators resolve the identity operator, and we specify the optimality conditions for partially symmetric states. Moreover, we show that from the complete solution for arbitrary values of the fixed rate of inconclusive results one can always obtain the optimum measurement in another strategy where the error rate is fixed, and vice versa.
We study the discrimination of NNN mixed quantum states in an optimal measurement that maximizes the probability of correct results while the probability of inconclusive results is fixed at a given value. After considering the discrimination of NNN states in a ddd-dimensional Hilbert space, we focus on the discrimination of qubit states. We develop a method to determine an optimal measurement for discriminating arbitrary qubit states, taking into account that often the optimal measurement is not unique and the maximum probability of correct results can be achieved by several different measurements. Analytical results are derived for a number of examples, mostly for the discrimination between qubit states which possess a partial symmetry, but also for discriminating NNN equiprobable qubit states and for the dicrimination between a pure and a uniformly mixed state in ddd dimensions. In the special case where the fixed rate of inconclusive results is equal to zero, our method provides a treatment for the minimum-error discrimination of arbitrary qubit states which differs from previous approaches.
We consider the problem of discrimination between a set of quantum states with the maximum probability of correct detection for a fixed rate of inconclusive results. We show that this type of measurement can be decomposed into two steps. The first step is the discrimination of whether the measurement result is inconclusive. The second step, which is performed in the case in which a conclusive result was obtained, is minimum error discrimination of output states of the first step. Using this result, we derive a closed-form analytical expression for an optimal measurement for both a geometrically uniform pure-state set and a set of binary doubly symmetric mixed states for any probability of an inconclusive result.
We present the solution to the problem of optimally discriminating among quantum states, i.e., identifying the states with maximum probability of success when a certain fixed rate of inconclusive answers is allowed. By varying the inconclusive rate, the scheme optimally interpolates between unambiguous and minimum error discrimination, the two standard approaches to quantum state discrimination. We introduce a very general method that enables us to obtain the solution in a wide range of cases and give a complete characterization of the minimum discrimination error as a function of the rate of inconclusive answers. A critical value of this rate is identified that coincides with the minimum failure probability in the cases where unambiguous discrimination is possible and provides a natural generalization of it when states cannot be unambiguously discriminated. The method is illustrated on two explicit examples: discrimination of two pure states with arbitrary prior probabilities and discrimination of trine states.
We study an optimal quantum measurement for generalized quantum state discrimination problems, which include the problem of finding an optimal measurement maximizing the average success probability with and without a fixed rate of inconclusive results and the problem of finding an optimal measurement in the Neyman-Pearson strategy. We show that for any generalized quantum state discrimination problem, there is a corresponding minimum error discrimination problem sharing the same optimal measurement. We propose an approach in which the optimal measurement is obtained by solving the corresponding minimum error discrimination problem, and clarify the relationship between optimal solutions to the original and the corresponding problems, with which one can obtain an optimal solution to the original problem in some cases. Moreover, as an example of application of our approach, we present an algorithm for numerically obtaining optimal solutions to generalized quantum state discrimination problems.
We propose an upper bound on the maximum correct probability of quantum measurements. The proposed bound is obtained by a suboptimal solution to the dual problem of the optimal state discrimination problems. We derive that a slightly modified version of the proposed bound is tighter than that proposed by Qiu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 81, 042329 (2010)]. We also propose an upper bound on the maximum correct probability with a fixed rate of inconclusive results. The performance of the proposed bounds are evaluated through numerical experiments.