Mathematical Methods of Statistics
Nonparametric estimation of the purity of a quantum state in quantum homodyne tomography with noisy data
Katia Méziani
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to answer an important issue in quantum mechanics, namely to estimate the purity of a quantum state of a light beam. Estimation of the purity is based on the results of quantum homodyne measurements performed on independent identically prepared quantum systems. The quantum state of the light is entirely characterized by the Wigner function, which can take negative values and must satisfy certain constraints of positivity imposed by quantum physics. We estimate the integrated squared Wigner function by a kernel-based second order U — statistic. This quadratic functional is a physical measure of the purity of the state. We also give an adaptive estimator, which does not depend on the smoothness parameters. We establish upper bounds of the minimax risk over a class of infinitely differentiable functions.