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Physical Review A

Direct measurement of general quantum states using strong measurement

Ping Zou, Zhi‐Ming Zhang, Wei Song

Published May 18, 2015• 27 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The direct state measurement (DSM) based on the weak measurement has the advantage of simplicity, versatility, and directness. However, the weak measurement will introduce an unavoidable error in the reconstructed quantum state. We modify the DSM by replacing the weak coupling between the system and the pointer by a strong one, and present two procedures for measuring quantum states, one of which can give the wave function or the density matrix directly. We can also measure the Dirac distribution of a discrete system directly. Furthermore, we propose quantum circuits for realizing these procedures, and the main body of the circuits consists of Toffoli gates. By numerical simulation, we find that our scheme can eliminate the biased error effectively.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.052109

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The direct state measurement (DSM) based on the weak measurement has the advantage of simplicity, versatility, and directness. However, the weak measurement will introduce an unavoidable error in the reconstructed quantum state. We modify the DSM by replacing the weak coupling between the system and the pointer by a strong one, and present two procedures for measuring quantum states, one of which can give the wave function or the density matrix directly. We can also measure the Dirac distribution of a discrete system directly. Furthermore, we propose quantum circuits for realizing these procedures, and the main body of the circuits consists of Toffoli gates. By numerical simulation, we find that our scheme can eliminate the biased error effectively.
Recent work by Lundeen et al. [Nature (London) 474, 188 (2011)] directly measured the wave function by weakly measuring a variable followed by a normal (i.e., "strong") measurement of the complementary variable. We generalize this method to mixed states by considering the weak measurement of various products of these observables, thereby providing the density matrix an operational definition in terms of a procedure for its direct measurement. The method only requires measurements in two bases and can be performed in situ, determining the quantum state without destroying it.
Abstract In the field of quantum information, the acquisition of information for unknown quantum states is very important. When we only need to obtain specific elements of a state density matrix, the traditional quantum state tomography will become very complicated, because it requires a global quantum state reconstruction. Direct measurement of the quantum state allows us to obtain arbitrary specific matrix elements of the quantum state without state reconstruction, so direct measurement schemes have obtained extensive attention. Recently, some direct measurement schemes based on weak values have been proposed, but extra auxiliary states in these schemes are necessary and it will increase the complexity of the practical experiment. Meanwhile, the post-selection process in the scheme will reduce the utilization of resources. In order to avoid these disadvantages, a direct measurement scheme without auxiliary states is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, we achieve the direct measurement of quantum states by using quantum circuits, then we extend it to the measurement of general multi-particle states and complete the error analysis. Finally, when we take into account the dephasing of the quantum states, we modify the circuits and the modified circuits still work for the dephasing case.
Based on the modified weak measurement scheme in [Y-X Zhang, S Wu and Z-B Chen, arXiv: 1504.07130], a modified direct state measurement (MDSM) is proposed without inherent bias. Compared with the existing direct state measurement (DSM), MDSM is more efficient and valid for any coupling strength. Through accurate Monte Carlo simulations, we get the optimal coupling strength to attain high efficiency. For the same reconstruction precision, we compare the number of copies needed in MDSM and the one in conventional quantum state tomography (QST) by simulations. We find MDSM is less efficient than conventional QST. However, MDSM is much easier to be realized in actual experiments, and might be more useful.
A direct measurement protocol allows reconstructing specific elements of the density matrix of a quantum state without using quantum state tomography. However, the direct measurement protocols to date are primarily based on weak or strong measurements with an ancillary pointer, which interacts with the investigated system to extract information about the specified elements. Here, we present a direct measurement scheme based on phase-shifting operations which do not need ancillary pointers. In this method, estimates of at most six expectation values of projective observables suffice to determine any specific element of an unknown quantum density matrix. A concrete quantum circuit to implement this direct measurement protocol for multiqubit states is provided, which is composed of just single-qubit gates and two multiqubit controlled-phase gates. This scheme is also extended for the direct measurement of the density matrix of continuous-variable quantum states. Our method can be used in quantum information applications where only partial information about the quantum state needs to be extracted, for example, problems such as entanglement witnessing, fidelity estimation of quantum systems, and quantum coherence estimation.
Weak measurements have thus far been considered instrumental in the so-called direct measurement of the quantum wave function [4J. S. Lundeen, Nature (London) 474, 188 (2011).]. Here we show that a direct measurement of the wave function can be obtained by using measurements of arbitrary strength. In particular, in the case of strong measurements, i.e., those in which the coupling between the system and the measuring apparatus is maximum, we compared the precision and the accuracy of the two methods, by showing that strong measurements outperform weak measurements in both for arbitrary quantum states in most cases. We also give the exact expression of the difference between the original and reconstructed wave function obtained by the weak measurement approach; this will allow one to define the range of applicability of such a method.
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.