Identifying an unknown unitary quantum process is a fundamental task in the development of quantum technology. In this paper, we propose an efficient identification algorithm for estimating unitary processes. In the method, input pure states are used and a fast quantum state tomography algorithm is developed to reconstruct the output states. Then the information of the output states is used to estimate the unitary process. The identification algorithm has computational complexity O(d3) for a d-dimensional system. Numerical results show that the proposed identification algorithm is much more efficient than the maximum likelihood estimation method and works well for input mixed states with high purity. An analytical upper bound for the identification error is also provided, and numerical simulations and experimental results on quantum optical systems verify the theoretical results.
Identifying an unknown unitary quantum process is a fundamental task in the development of quantum technology. In this paper, we propose an efficient identification algorithm for estimating unitary processes. In the method, input pure states are used and a fast quantum state tomography algorithm is developed to reconstruct the output states. Then the information of the output states is used to estimate the unitary process. The identification algorithm has computational complexity O(d3) for a d-dimensional system. Numerical results show that the proposed identification algorithm is much more efficient than the maximum likelihood estimation method and works well for input mixed states with high purity. An analytical upper bound for the identification error is also provided, and numerical simulations and experimental results on quantum optical systems verify the theoretical results.
Quantum process tomography (QPT) methods aim at identifying a given quantum process. QPT is a major quantum information processing tool, since it especially allows one to characterize the actual behavior of quantum gates, which are the building blocks of quantum computers. The present paper focuses on the estimation of a unitary process. This class is of particular interest because quantum mechanics postulates that the evolution of any closed quantum system is described by a unitary transformation. Unitary processes have significantly fewer parameters than general quantum processes (22nqb vs. 24nqb−22nqb real independent parameters for nqb qubits). By assuming that the process is unitary we develop two methods that scale better with the size of the system. In the present paper, we stay as close as possible to the standard setup of QPT: the operator has to prepare copies of different input states. The properties those states have to satisfy in order for our method to achieve QPT are very mild. Therefore, we choose to operate with copies of 2nqb initially unknown pure input states. In order to perform QPT without knowing the input states, we perform measurements on half the copies of each state, and let the other half be transformed by the system before measuring them (each copy is only measured once). This setup has the advantage of removing the issue of systematic (i.e., same on all the copies of a state) errors entirely because it does not require the process input to take predefined values. We develop a straightforward analytical solution that first estimates the states from the averaged measurements and then finds the unitary matrix (representing the process) coherent with those estimates by using our analytical solution to an extended version of Wahba’s problem. This estimate may then be used as an initial point for a fine tuning algorithm that maximizes the likelihood of the measurements. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Quantum process tomography (QPT) methods aim at identifying a given quantum process. QPT is a major quantum information processing tool, since it allows one to characterize the actual behavior of quantum gates, which are the building blocks of quantum computers. The present paper focuses on the estimation of a unitary process. This class is of particular interest because quantum mechanics postulates that the evolution of any closed quantum system is described by a unitary transformation. The standard approach of QPT is to measure copies of a particular set of predetermined (generally pure) states after they have been modified by the process to be identified. The main problem with this setup is that preparing an input state and setting it precisely to a predetermined value is challenging and thus yields errors. These errors can be decomposed into a sum of centered errors (i.e., whose average on all the copies is zero) and systematic errors that are the same for all the copies. The latter is often the main source of error in QPT. The algorithm we introduce works for any input states that make QPT theoretically possible (i.e., unless there are several solutions due to, e.g., a lack of diversity in the input states). The fact that we do not require the input states to be precisely set to predetermined values means that we can use a trick to remove the issue of systematic errors by considering that some states' copies are unknown but measured before they go through the process to be identified. We achieve this by splitting the copies of each input state into several groups and measuring the copies of the kth group after they have successively been transferred through k instances of the process to be identified (each copy of each input state is used for only a single measurement). Using this approach, we can compute estimates of the measured states before and after they go through the process without using the knowledge we might have about the initial states. We test our algorithm with simulated data, and we assess its performance with a cnot gate on a trapped-ions qubit quantum computer.
Characterization of quantum processes is a preliminary step necessary in the development of quantum technology. The conventional method uses standard quantum process tomography, which requires d2 input states and d4 quantum measurements for a d-dimensional Hilbert space. These experimental requirements are compounded by the complexity of processing the collected data, which can take several orders of magnitude longer than the experiment itself. In this paper we propose an alternative self-guided algorithm for quantum process tomography, tuned for the task of finding an unknown unitary process. Our algorithm is a fully automated and adaptive process characterization technique. The advantages of our algorithm are the following: it has an inherent robustness to both statistical and technical noise; it requires less space and time since there is no postprocessing of the data; it requires only a single input state and measurement; and it provides on-the-fly diagnostic information while the experiment is running. Numerical results show our algorithm achieves the same 1/n scaling as standard quantum process tomography when n uses of the unknown process are used. We also present experimental results wherein the algorithm and its advantages are realized for the task of finding an element of SU(2).
Quantum process tomography (QPT) methods aim at identifying a given quantum process. QPT is a major quantum information processing tool, since it especially allows one to characterize the actual behavior of quantum gates, which are the building blocks of quantum computers. The present paper focuses on the estimation of a two-qubit unitary process. This class is of particular interest because quantum mechanics postulates that the evolution of any closed quantum system is described by a unitary transformation. Usual QPT methods can be hard to implement in practice because they require the user to prepare copies of a set of known quantum states. In contrast, the proposed methods only require the user to be able to provide copies of a single unknown input state which can be estimated along with the process. However, we need to be able to make measurements of the state of the system after 5 different time delays ∆t, 2∆t, 3∆t, 4∆t, 5∆t(one measurement per copy). We detail a least square approach which exploits tools used in the aerospace community. A slower but more precise maximum likelihood method is also introduced. It uses a simple parametrization of unitary matrices.
Quantum Hamiltonian identification (QHI) is important for characterizing the dynamics of quantum systems, calibrating quantum devices, and achieving precise quantum control. In this paper, an effective two-step optimization (TSO) QHI algorithm is developed within the framework of quantum process tomography. In the identification method, different probe states are input into quantum systems and the output states are estimated using the quantum state tomography protocol via linear regression estimation. The time-independent system Hamiltonian is reconstructed based on the experimental data for the output states. The Hamiltonian identification method has computational complexity O(d6), where d is the dimension of the system Hamiltonian. An error upper bound O( d3/√N ) is also established, where N is the resource number for the tomography of each output state, and several numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TSO Hamiltonian identification method.
We describe algorithms to obtain an approximate classical description of a d-dimensional quantum state when given access to a unitary (and its inverse) that prepares it. For pure states we characterize the query complexity for ℓq-norm error up to logarithmic factors. As a special case, we show that it takes applications of the unitaries to obtain an ε-ℓ2-approximation of the state. For mixed states we consider a similar model, where the unitary prepares a purification of the state. We characterize the query complexity for obtaining Schatten q-norm estimates of a rank-r mixed state, up to polylogarithmic factors. In particular, we show that a trace-norm (q = 1) estimate can be obtained with queries. This improves (assuming our stronger input model) the ε-dependence over the works of O'Donnell and Wright (STOC 2016) and Haah et al. (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 63.9, 2017), that use a joint measurement on copies of the state. To our knowledge, the most sample-efficient results for pure-state tomography come from setting the rank to 1 in generic mixed-state tomography algorithms, which can require a large amount of computing resources. We describe sample-optimal algorithms for pure states that are simple and fast to implement. Along the way we show that an ℓ∞-norm estimate of a normalized vector induces a (slightly worse) ℓq-norm estimate for that vector, without losing a dimension-dependent factor in the precision. We also develop an unbiased and symmetric version of phase estimation, where the probability distribution of the estimate is centered around the true value. Finally, we give an efficient method for estimating multiple expectation values, improving over the recent result by Huggins et al. (arXiv:2111.09283) when the measurement operators do not fully overlap. More specifically, we show that for E1,…, Em normalized measurement operators, all expectation values Tr(Ejρ) can be efficiently learned up to error ε with applications of a state-preparation unitary for a purification of ρ. * The full version of the paper can be accessed at https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.08800