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 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.
We examine the problem of finding the minimum number of Pauli measurements needed to uniquely determine an arbitrary n-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 computation - the use of quantum systems as bits, or qubits, to perform computation - has been proven to be exponentially faster than what is thought possible with classical computation for several tasks. Quantum computers have the unique ability to store an amount of information that is exponential in the number of constituent particles used to encode that information. This property, which is arguably where quantum computers derive their power, makes it very difficult to characterize quantum systems. In order to fully characterize an unknown quantum state, a series of measurements must be performed on it and the state deduced from the results of those measurements. This process, called quantum tomography, is known to require exponential resources in the number of qubits. Both the number of measurements - the measurement complexity - and the number of times each measurement must be repeated - the sample complexity - present serious challenges when performing tomography. In addition, the measurement apparatus itself, which is usually a quantum system, must be characterized leading to even more experimental complexity. Here, I present three experiments which aim to reduce the experimental complexity of quantum tomography. The first aims to reduce the number of measurements needed to locate the decoherence-free subspaces of a noisy quantum channel. The process of locating these subspaces, which would normally require full process tomography, is performed with quadratically fewer measurement settings. The second experiment aims to characterize both an uncalibrated measurement apparatus and an unknown quantum state at the same time. With a specific model of measurement, it is found that an uncalibrated parameter of the measurement can be directly extracted using a single measurement. In the third experiment, I perform an experiment in which the optimal sample complexity for quantum state tomography is obtained using adaptivity: the ability to change measurement settings part way through an experiment. All three experiments were performed using the polarization degree of freedom of photons generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion. The source of photon pairs and the measurement techniques used are described in detail, along with the theory of quantum distinguishability and its relevance to tomography.
We investigate the problem of efficiently estimating expectation values of large sets of observables from copies of an unknown many-body quantum state. This task, known as shadow tomography, is crucial for quantum simulation and quantum chemistry, where the relevant observables often include k -body fermionic or k -local Pauli operators. A key goal is to achieve sample efficiency, computational efficiency, and few-copy measurements. We introduce the notion of triply efficient shadow tomography to formalize these requirements. Prior work has shown that single-copy measurements suffice for k -local Pauli operators with constant k . However, we prove that for k -body fermionic observables and the full set of n -qubit Pauli operators, single-copy protocols fail to achieve sample-efficient tomography. We then present new protocols based on measuring two copies of the state at a time that overcome these lower bounds, providing a triply efficient protocol.
In quantum information transformation and quantum computation, the most critical issues are security and accuracy. These features, therefore, stimulate research on quantum state characterization. A characterization tool, Quantum state tomography, reconstructs the density matrix of an unknown quantum state. Theoretically, reconstructing an unknown state using this method can be arbitrarily accurate. However, this is less practical owing to the huge burden of measurements and data processing for large numbers of qubits. Even comprising an efficient estimator and a precise algorithm, an optimal tomographic framework can also be overburdened owing to the exponential growth of the measurements. Moreover, the consequential postprocessing of huge amounts of data challenges the capacity of computers. Thus, it is crucial to build an efficient framework that requires fewer measurements but yields an expected accuracy. To this end, we built a tomography schema by which only a few Pauli measurements enable an accurate tomographic reconstruction. Subsequently, this schema was verified as efficient and accurate through numerical simulations on the tomography of multi-qubit quantum states. Furthermore, this schema was proven to be robust through numerical simulations on a noisy superconducting qubit system. Therefore, the tomography schema paves an alternatively effective way to reconstruct the density matrix of a quantum state owing to its efficiency and accuracy, which are essential for quantum state tomography.
The development of large-scale platforms for quantum information requires new methods for verification and validation of quantum behavior. Quantum tomography (QT) is the standard tool for diagnosing quantum states, process, and readout devices by providing complete information. However, QT is limited since it is expensive to not only implement experimentally, but also requires heavy classical post-processing of data. In this dissertation, we introduce new methods for QT that are more efficient to implement and robust to noise and errors, thereby making QT a more practical tool for current quantum information experiments. The crucial detail that makes these new, efficient, and robust methods possible is prior information about the quantum system. This prior information is prompted by the goals of most experiments in quantum information, which require pure states, unitary processes, and rank-1 POVM operators. Therefore, most experiments are designed to operate near this ideal regime. We show that when this is the case, QT can be accomplished with significantly fewer resources, and produce a robust estimate in the presence of noise and errors. Moreover, the estimate is also robust if the state is not exactly pure, the process is not exactly unitary, or the POVM is not exactly rank-1. Such compelling methods are only made possible by the positivity constraint on quantum states, processes, and POVMs. This requirement is an inherent feature of quantum mechanics, but has powerful consequences to QT. Since QT is necessarily an experimental tool, we discuss a test of these new methods in an experimental setting. The physical system is an ensemble of laser-cooled cesium atoms in the laboratory of Prof. Poul Jessen. Experiments were conducted by Hector Sosa-Martinez et al. to demonstrate different QT protocols. We compare the results, and conclude that the new methods are effective.
The deployment of intermediate- and large-scale quantum devices necessitates the development of efficient full state tomographical techniques for quantum benchmarks. Here, we introduce a matrix filling-based method for tomography of pure quantum states, called the matrix-completion quantum state tomography. This method requires only 2n + 1 local Pauli operators and minimal post-processing for n-qubit states. Numerical results show that our method is highly efficient on superconducting real quantum devices and achieves better fidelity estimates of multiqubit quantum states as compared to contemporary pure state tomography methods. These desirable features of the matrix-completion quantum state tomography protocol make it suitable for the benchmarking of intermediate- and large-scale quantum devices dealing mainly with pure quantum states.