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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Scalable on-chip quantum state tomography

James Titchener, Markus Gräfe, René Heilmann, Alexander S. Solntsev, Alexander Szameit, Andrey A. Sukhorukov

Published Jun 1, 2017• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Summary form only given. Full characterization of quantum states is increasingly important as ever more complex quantum systems are realized. Quantum state tomography of these systems is a difficult task because individual measurements only give partial information about the underlying density matrix of the system. Thus, conventionally the measurement apparatus must be reconfigured to take multiple measurements in order to fully determine the density matrix. It is accepted that for an W-qubit system an exponentially increasing number of measurements are needed [1]. As a consequence, the complexity of typical quantum state tomography grows exponentially with increasing photon number, which makes characterizing large quantum systems highly challenging. We formulate a concept of on-chip quantum tomography where the complexity scales linearly with the number of photons. This is achieved by using a single specially designed non-reconfigurable linear optical circuit as in Fig. 1(a). Crucially, the number of waveguides in this circuit scales linearly with the number of photons in the state to be measured. Furthermore, our approach is simple and robust, and we demonstrate it experimentally with a specially designed photonic chip.

DOI
10.1109/cleoe-eqec.2017.8087409

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Summary form only given. Full characterization of quantum states is increasingly important as ever more complex quantum systems are realized. Quantum state tomography of these systems is a difficult task because individual measurements only give partial information about the underlying density matrix of the system. Thus, conventionally the measurement apparatus must be reconfigured to take multiple measurements in order to fully determine the density matrix. It is accepted that for an W-qubit system an exponentially increasing number of measurements are needed [1]. As a consequence, the complexity of typical quantum state tomography grows exponentially with increasing photon number, which makes characterizing large quantum systems highly challenging. We formulate a concept of on-chip quantum tomography where the complexity scales linearly with the number of photons. This is achieved by using a single specially designed non-reconfigurable linear optical circuit as in Fig. 1(a). Crucially, the number of waveguides in this circuit scales linearly with the number of photons in the state to be measured. Furthermore, our approach is simple and robust, and we demonstrate it experimentally with a specially designed photonic chip.
Abstract Quantum information systems are on a path to vastly exceed the complexity of any classical device. The number of entangled qubits in quantum devices is rapidly increasing, and the information required to fully describe these systems scales exponentially with qubit number. This scaling is the key benefit of quantum systems, however it also presents a severe challenge. To characterize such systems typically requires an exponentially long sequence of different measurements, becoming highly resource demanding for large numbers of qubits. Here we propose and demonstrate a novel and scalable method for characterizing quantum systems based on expanding a multi-photon state to larger dimensionality. We establish that the complexity of this new measurement technique only scales linearly with the number of qubits, while providing a tomographically complete set of data without a need for reconfigurability. We experimentally demonstrate an integrated photonic chip capable of measuring two- and three-photon quantum states with statistical reconstruction fidelity of 99.71%.
Technologies based on quantum mechanics promise to revolutionize the collection, processing and communication of information. However, due to the fragility of quantum coherence, complex quantum states can only exist in highly isolated and stable environments. One suitable environment is that of a quantum photonic chip. Quantum integrated photonics seeks to generate, process and detect complex quantum states inside a photonic chip. This thesis presents theory and experimental verification of novel approaches for the integration of various functionalities into quantum photonic chips in a scalable way. As such, this thesis encompasses a broad area of physics including quantum optics and nonlinear photonics. The results presented in this thesis have applications in the areas of quantum enhanced measurement, communication and information processing. In particular we develop the theory and experimentally demonstrate flexible on-chip sources of spatially entangled photons, the state of which can be reconfigured alloptically. We show how such techniques could enable the realization of simple cluster state quantum computing algorithms using spatially encoded two-photon states. Furthermore, we suggest new and practical approaches for the efficient characterization of mass produced nonlinear quantum photonic chips. Finally we develop and experimentally demonstrate a scalable method for the full quantum state tomography of multi-photon states on-chip. Importantly this technique only requires a linearly increasing number of single photon detectors relative to the number of photons in the state being characterized, and is also highly compatible with on-chip single photon detectors.
Abstract Reconstructing the state of a quantum system represents a pivotal task for quantum information applications. The standard approach based on quantum state tomography requires a number of measurements that scales exponentially with the number of qubits. Other methods have been proposed and tested to reduce the number of measurements, or to focus on specific properties of the output state rather than on its complete reconstruction. Here, we show experimentally the application of an approach, called threshold quantum state tomography, in an advanced hybrid photonic platform with states up to n = 4 qubits. This method does not require prior knowledge and selects only the informative projectors starting from the measurement of the density matrix diagonal. We demonstrate its effectiveness by showing that a consistent reduction in the number of measurements is obtained for relevant states, with only very limited loss of information. These results open perspective for its application in larger systems.
This work proposes to carry out a study on integrated photonic circuits. Our goal is to develop a methodology for obtaining the parameters of a photonic circuit that allows us to perform a set of quantum operations necessary for the realization of a given task or quantum processing. More specifically, the quantum tasks involve the implementation of a POVM (Positive Operator Value Measure) through integrated photonic circuits. Thus, we seek to obtain optimized configurations for these devices so that the reduction of their structural complexity simplifies their manufacturing process. In addition, it is also our goal that such objects are robust against errors and losses and that the experimental applications that involve them present a minimization of the time necessary for their realization. We studied the symmetries of the proposed POVMs to, from them, configure the circuit in an optimized way. Initially, we studied the case of quantum state tomography for qubits and qutrits. We obtained planar circuits that had a smaller number of optical elements and an optical depth than those obtained by methods already known in the literature. In addition, these circuits implement all POVM elements at once, making it possible to obtain all their associated probabilities at once, minimizing the time spent on the experiment compared to experiments on an optical table or with reconfigurable circuits, where it is necessary to make changes to the configuration of the experimental apparatus from one POVM element to another. Looking for a way to generalize our protocol to larger systems, we developed a method to obtain three-dimensional photonic circuits that can be used in the experimental realization of quantum state tomography in qudits of any finite dimension. Our protocol generates circuits whose number of beam splitters and optical depth scale with functions less than in other protocols already known, showing a drastic reduction in their complexity. In addition, these circuits were highly robust in relation to the occurrence of losses. The same protocol used to obtain three-dimensional circuits for performing quantum tomography can be used to obtain circuits to implement quantum coherence measurements. The circuits obtained here also have the same advantages as the tomographic case.
Quantum state tomography is an essential tool for characterizing quantum systems and underpins nearly every experimental realization of quantum technologies. Conventional tomography relies on performing a sequence of projective measurements on many identical copies of a quantum state, requiring the measurement apparatus to be reconfigured between successive acquisitions. As the Hilbert-space dimension increases, the number of required measurements grows rapidly; in practice, additional overcomplete measurements are often performed to improve robustness to experimental imperfections. Here, we introduce a tomography platform based on structured anisotropic media that performs informationally complete measurements of photonic polarization qubits within a single acquisition. The approach employs three liquid-crystal metasurfaces with spatially varying optic-axis orientations that transform the input polarization into a far-field distribution of discrete transverse-momentum modes. Each diffraction pattern uniquely determines the polarization state, enabling its reconstruction without sequential changes to the measurement apparatus. Unlike previous implementations, our scheme is intrinsically photon-number independent: the same optical device operates identically for arbitrary photon numbers, while the desired photon-number sector can be selected afterwards through post-selection of the corresponding nnn-fold coincidence events. We experimentally demonstrate single-frame quantum state tomography of both single- and two-photon polarization states, providing a simple and scalable route toward efficient quantum-state characterization.