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Adaptive Tomography of Pure States and Unitary Gates

Carson Yanning Li

Published Jan 4, 2017• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The successful implementation of complex quantum algorithms depend crucially on our ability to determine unknown quantum states and operations. In this work, we present adaptive and non-adaptive methods to determine a 1-qubit unitary gate with 5 and 6 Pauli measurements. We demonstrate the method on the Bloch sphere to show that studying higher dimensional real space may help in finding tomography methods of multiple qubit unitary gates. Next, we show an adaptive method to uniquely determine a general d-dimensional pure state among all quantum states with at most 2d - 1 measurements. This method is then applied to determine a general d-dimensional unitary gate with at most d^2 + d - 1 measurements. These methods are applied in tomographing a 2-qubit universal gate set with five unitary gates. On the NMR experimental system, the lowest fidelity achieved was above 97% with 42 Pauli measurements, comparing to 99% using traditional method that requires 240 Pauli measurements.

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The successful implementation of complex quantum algorithms depend crucially on our ability to determine unknown quantum states and operations. In this work, we present adaptive and non-adaptive methods to determine a 1-qubit unitary gate with 5 and 6 Pauli measurements. We demonstrate the method on the Bloch sphere to show that studying higher dimensional real space may help in finding tomography methods of multiple qubit unitary gates. Next, we show an adaptive method to uniquely determine a general d-dimensional pure state among all quantum states with at most 2d - 1 measurements. This method is then applied to determine a general d-dimensional unitary gate with at most d^2 + d - 1 measurements. These methods are applied in tomographing a 2-qubit universal gate set with five unitary gates. On the NMR experimental system, the lowest fidelity achieved was above 97% with 42 Pauli measurements, comparing to 99% using traditional method that requires 240 Pauli measurements.
In experiments it is often required that we determine an unknown quantum state produced by a source. Quantum Tomography accomplishes this through repeated measurements on the state. This process requires 4^n measurements for an n-qubit system. However, if it is known that the state is pure, fewer measurements are required. Many such results already exist, but they either use non-local measurements or they have some chance of failing. Our goal is to obtain the smallest set of Pauli operators which can uniquely determine any pure state among all states. This involves ensuring the complement of the span of the measurements must have two positive and two negative eigenvalues. This is nontrivial since there are few relationships between the eigenvalues of a set of operators and the eigenvalues their real linear combinations. We obtain the lower bound of 30 Paulis necessary for 3-qubit tomography which improves on any known result.
In this paper, we focus on two-qubit pure state tomography. For an arbitrary unknown two-qubit pure state, separable or entangled, it has been found that the measurement probabilities of 16 projections onto the tensor products of Pauli eigenstates are enough to uniquely determine the state. Moreover, these corresponding product states are arranged into five orthonormal bases. We design five quantum circuits, which are decomposed into the common gates in universal quantum computation, to simulate the five projective measurements onto these bases. At the end of each circuit, we measure each qubit with the projective measurement {|0⟩⟨0|,|1⟩⟨1|}. Then, we consider the open problem whether three orthonormal bases are enough to distinguish all two-qubit pure states. A necessary condition is given. Suppose that there are three orthonormal bases { B 1 , B 2 , B 3 } . Denote the unitary transition matrices from B 1 to { B 2 , B 3 } as U 1 and U 2 . All 32 elements of matrices U 1 and U 2 should not be zero. If not, these three bases cannot distinguish all two-qubit pure states.
We examine the problem of finding the minimum number of Pauli measurements needed to uniquely determine an arbitrary nnn-qubit pure state among all quantum states. We show that only 11 Pauli measurements are needed to determine an arbitrary two-qubit pure state compared to the full quantum state tomography with 16 measurements, and only 31 Pauli measurements are needed to determine an arbitrary three-qubit pure state compared to the full quantum state tomography with 64 measurements. We demonstrate that our protocol is robust under depolarizing error with simulated random pure states. We experimentally test the protocol on two- and three-qubit systems with nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. We show that the pure-state tomography protocol saves us a number of measurements without considerable loss of fidelity. We compare our protocol with same-size sets of randomly selected Pauli operators and find that our selected set of Pauli measurements significantly outperforms those random sampling sets. As a direct application, our scheme can also be used to reduce the number of settings needed for pure-state tomography in quantum optical systems.
Quantum state tomography (QST) estimates an unknown quantum state from a measurement process typically performed on identical copies of the target state and plays a core role in characterizing quantum information systems. However, because quantum measurement outcomes are probabilistic, QST methods often require many shots per basis to achieve high-fidelity estimates, which hinders scalability to many-qubit applications and slows the transmission of quantum information. A more efficient procedure is therefore required for modern-day quantum operations in quantum computing, communications, and sensing. We address this need with an adaptive QST approach that measures a single-qubit state in a wide set of bases. We include bases beyond the Pauli triad {X,Y,Z} by leveraging the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of quantum mechanics, increasing the likelihood of producing highly polarized measurement outcomes and finding an optimally informative basis. With this basis, the state can be identified with fewer measurements by focusing on directions that most reduce uncertainty of the state. In addition to theoretical innovation in [9], we experimentally verify in a simplified photonic realization using 13 bases that having many more available measurement bases than the Pauli triad benefits QST. This engineering implementation demonstrates that adaptive QST is both efficient in performance and practical to implement.
Abstract Extracting information from quantum devices has long been a crucial problem in the field of quantum mechanics. By performing elaborate measurements, quantum state tomography, an important and fundamental tool in quantum science and technology, can be used to determine unknown quantum states completely. In this study, methods to determine multi‐qubit pure quantum states uniquely and directly are explored. Two adaptive protocols are proposed, with their respective quantum circuits. Herein, two or three observables are sufficient, while the number of measurement outcomes are either the same as or fewer than those in existing methods. Additionally, experiments on the IBM 5‐qubit quantum computer, as well as numerical investigations, demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed protocols.
We give an algorithm for pure state tomography with near-optimal copy and time complexity using only single-qubit measurements. Specifically, given O~(2n/ε)\widetilde{O}(2^n/ε)O(2n/ε) copies of an unknown nnn-qubit pure state ∣ψ⟩|ψ\rangle∣ψ⟩, the algorithm performs only nonadaptive Pauli measurements, runs in time O~(2n/ε)\widetilde{O}(2^n/ε)O(2n/ε), and outputs ∣ψ^⟩|\widehatψ \rangle∣ψ​⟩ with fidelity at least 1−ε1-ε1−ε with ∣ψ⟩|ψ\rangle∣ψ⟩ with high probability. This is the first algorithm for pure state tomography that achieves near-optimal running time.