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Physics

Mapping Out the State of a Quantum System

Andrew N. Jordan

Published Sep 12, 2016• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

One drawback of conventional quantum state tomography is that it does not readily provide access to single density matrix elements since it requires a global reconstruction.Here, we experimentally demonstrate a scheme that can be used to directly measure individual density matrix elements of general quantum states.The scheme relies on measuring a sequence of three observables, each complementary to the last.The first two measurements are made weak to minimize the disturbance they cause to the state, while the final measurement is strong.We perform this joint measurement on polarized photons in pure and mixed states to directly measure their density matrix.The weak measurements are achieved using two walk-off crystals, each inducing a polarization-dependent spatial shift that couples the spatial and polarization degrees of freedom of the photons.This direct measurement method provides an operational meaning to the density matrix and promises to be especially useful for large dimensional states.

DOI
10.1103/physics.9.104

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One drawback of conventional quantum state tomography is that it does not readily provide access to single density matrix elements since it requires a global reconstruction.Here, we experimentally demonstrate a scheme that can be used to directly measure individual density matrix elements of general quantum states.The scheme relies on measuring a sequence of three observables, each complementary to the last.The first two measurements are made weak to minimize the disturbance they cause to the state, while the final measurement is strong.We perform this joint measurement on polarized photons in pure and mixed states to directly measure their density matrix.The weak measurements are achieved using two walk-off crystals, each inducing a polarization-dependent spatial shift that couples the spatial and polarization degrees of freedom of the photons.This direct measurement method provides an operational meaning to the density matrix and promises to be especially useful for large dimensional states.
One drawback of conventional quantum state tomography is that it does not readily provide access to single density matrix elements since it requires a global reconstruction. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a scheme that can be used to directly measure individual density matrix elements of general quantum states. The scheme relies on measuring a sequence of three observables, each complementary to the last. The first two measurements are made weak to minimize the disturbance they cause to the state, while the final measurement is strong. We perform this joint measurement on polarized photons in pure and mixed states to directly measure their density matrix. The weak measurements are achieved using two walk-off crystals, each inducing a polarization-dependent spatial shift that couples the spatial and polarization degrees of freedom of the photons. This direct measurement method provides an operational meaning to the density matrix and promises to be especially useful for large dimensional states.
One of the fundamental problems of experimental quantum physics is the determination of the state of a system, which provides its accurate description and contains all the available information about it. The standard solution is quantum state tomography, a technique that employs a large number of measurements of complementary observables to reconstruct a general density operator. Recently, new protocols have been proposed which allow to obtain the matrix elements one by one with fewer and less complicated observations by exploiting so-called weak measurements, that perturb the system less than ideal projections at the cost of being less precise. This thesis presents an evolution of these schemes that eschews the weakness of the measurement, thus gaining in the accuracy of the results and in practical feasibility. We realized an experiment that uses these methods to reconstruct the density operator of the polarization state of light in single photons regime.
New techniques based on weak measurements have recently been introduced to the field of quantum state reconstruction. Some of them allow the direct measurement of each matrix element of an unknown density operator and need only O(d) different operations, compared to d^{2} linearly independent projectors in the case of standard quantum state tomography, for the reconstruction of an arbitrary mixed state. However, due to the weakness of these couplings, these protocols are approximated and prone to large statistical errors. We propose a method which is similar to the weak measurement protocols but works regardless of the coupling strength: our protocol is not approximated and thus improves the accuracy and precision of the results with respect to weak measurement schemes. We experimentally apply it to the polarization state of single photons and compare the results to those of preexisting methods for different values of the coupling strength. Our results show that our method outperforms previous proposals in terms of accuracy and statistical errors.
Tomography allows one to estimate the density matrix describing the state an ensemble of quantum systems are prepared in (for example, polarization tomography determines the polarization state of a beam of identically prepared photons). In general, it is not possible to uniquely decompose the density matrix into its pure state components. Agarwal et al. proposed a protocol which, for a mixture composed of any two pure states of a qubit (with arbitrary probabilities), allows an observer to infer not only the density matrix but the identity of those specific pure states and their weights - the additional requirement being that the qubits arrive in pairs, where both qubits in each pair are in the same state. We experimentally demonstrate this learning-from-pairs concept using photons in the polarization degree of freedom. We use tomography to measure a sequence of single photons and make use of their time-of-arrival information to 'pair up' the photons after the measurement. From here we are able to infer the photons' polarization states and their respective probabilities, and we demonstrate this for various different choices of polarization states and ratios. Finally, we investigate our ability to discriminate between two equal mixtures of distinct pairs of orthogonal polarization states. We find that on the order of approx. 10e4 photons is typically enough to achieve tomography fidelities of approximately 0.9999. This is sufficient to discriminate between two different preparations of the same mixed state, differing by angles of less than 5 degrees between the pure states used in the two preparations.
Recent work has revealed that the wave function of a pure state can be measured directly and that complementary knowledge of a quantum system can be obtained simultaneously by weak measurements. However, the original scheme applies only to pure states, and it is not efficient because most of the data are discarded by post-selection. Here, we propose tomography schemes for pure states and for mixed states via weak measurements, and our schemes are more efficient because we do not discard any data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that any matrix element of a general state can be directly read from an appropriate weak measurement. The density matrix (with all of its elements) represents all that is directly accessible from a general measurement.