Abstract Finding the least measurement settings to determine an arbitrary pure state has been long known as the Pauli problem. Peres conjectured that two unbiased bases may be sufficient to determine a pure state up to some finite ambiguities. Here we find that the Peres conjecture is correct in the case d = 3 where a pure state is determined up to at most six candidates states and is incorrect in the case of d = 4 for which a counterexample is constructed. We observe that the target state can be picked out from candidates states by an adaptive two-outcome measurement. We thus provided a minimal qutrit tomography protocol constituted of three measurements in contrast to the four measurements required in previous non-adaptive method. We also reduce a five-measurement protocol for a pure qudit state into three full-dimensional measurements and one two-outcome measurement protocol, which exhibits robustness to the usual white noise thus also applies to nearly pure state.
Abstract Finding the least measurement settings to determine an arbitrary pure state has been long known as the Pauli problem. Peres conjectured that two unbiased bases may be sufficient to determine a pure state up to some finite ambiguities. Here we find that the Peres conjecture is correct in the case d = 3 where a pure state is determined up to at most six candidates states and is incorrect in the case of d = 4 for which a counterexample is constructed. We observe that the target state can be picked out from candidates states by an adaptive two-outcome measurement. We thus provided a minimal qutrit tomography protocol constituted of three measurements in contrast to the four measurements required in previous non-adaptive method. We also reduce a five-measurement protocol for a pure qudit state into three full-dimensional measurements and one two-outcome measurement protocol, which exhibits robustness to the usual white noise thus also applies to nearly pure state.
Finding the least measurement settings to determine an arbitrary pure state has been long known as the Pauli problem. In the fixed measurement scheme four orthonormal bases are required even though there are far less parameters in a pure state. Peres conjectured that two unbiased bases suffice to determine a pure state up to some finite ambiguities. Here we shall at first prove Peres conjecture in the case of d=3,4, namely, two unbiased measurements determine a pure state up to to 6 and 16 candidates for a qutrit and ququad, respectively. And then, taking Peres' conjecture for established, we propose an adaptive 3-measurement scheme involving the minimal number of measurements, based on the observation that the ambiguities can be removed by an adaptive two-outcome projective measurement. With the help of this observation, we simplify a recent five-basis protocol [Phys.Rev.Lett.115,090401(2015)] to a three-basis one at the cost of the extra dichotomic measurement.
Efficiently extracting information from pure quantum states using minimal observables on the main system is a longstanding and fundamental issue in quantum information theory. Despite the inability of probability distributions of position and momentum to uniquely specify a wavefunction, Peres conjectured a discrete version wherein two complementary observables, analogous to position and momentum and realized as projective measurements onto orthogonal bases, can determine all pure qudits up to a finite set of ambiguities. Subsequent findings revealed the impossibility of uniquely determining d-dimenisonal pure states even when neglecting a measure-zero set with any two orthogonal bases, and Peres's conjecture is also correct for d=3 but not for d=4. In this study, we show that two orthogonal bases are capable of effectively filtering up to 2d−1 finite candidates by disregarding a measure-zero set, without involving complex numbers in the bases' coefficients. Additionally, drawing inspiration from sequential measurements to directly calculate the target coefficients of the wavefunction using two complementary observables, we show that almost all pure qudits can be uniquely determined by adaptively incorporating a POVM in the middle, followed by measuring the complementary observable.
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.
We propose an efficient scheme for qutrit state tomography based on optimal unambiguous discrimination of three nonorthogonal pure qutrit states. In our scheme, we first introduce an ancillary qubit initially prepared in a known state and apply a joint unitary transformation on the whole system composed of a qutrit state and an ancillary qubit state. Afterwards, we make a local von Neumann measurement (VNM) on the ancillary qubit. If it is projected onto the state |0〉, we finally perform mutually unbiased measurements (MUMs) on the collapsed qutrit state arbitrarily chosen from a complete set of four mutually unbiased bases (MUBs). With only six properly-chosen projectors, the real and imaginary parts of non-diagonal elements can be entirely obtained. Together with the diagonal elements obtained directly from one VNM in the computational bases, the density matrix of an arbitrary unknown qutrit state can be fully determined. Compared with the previous work (R. Salazar and A. Delgado 2012), our scheme consumes much less resources. In comparison with MUBs-based tomography scheme (H. Yuan, et al., 2016), our scheme requires more measurements and less projectors, but pays the price of a loss of certain fraction identically prepared states. Our proposal can be extended to the case of other d-dimensional quantum states if their d MUBs are exactly known.
For any finite-dimensional Hilbert space, we construct explicitly five orthonormal bases such that the corresponding measurements allow for efficient tomography of an arbitrary pure quantum state. This means that such measurements can be used to distinguish an arbitrary pure state from any other state, pure or mixed, and the pure state can be reconstructed from the outcome distribution in a feasible way. The set of measurements we construct is independent of the unknown state, and therefore our results provide a fixed scheme for pure state tomography, as opposed to the adaptive (state-dependent) scheme proposed by Goyeneche et al. ( Phys. Rev. Lett. , 115 (2015) 090401). We show that our scheme is robust with respect to noise, in the sense that any measurement scheme which approximates these measurements well enough is equally suitable for pure state tomography. Finally, we present two convex programs which can be used to reconstruct the unknown pure state from the measurement outcome distributions.
We present a proof-of-principle demonstration of a method to characterize any pure spatial qudit of arbitrary dimension d, which is based on the classic phase-shift interferometry technique. In the proposed scheme a total of only 4d measurement outcomes are needed, implying a significant reduction with respect to the standard schemes for quantum-state tomography which require on the order of d2. By using this technique, we have experimentally reconstructed a large number of states ranging from d=2 up to 14 with mean fidelity values higher than 0.97. For that purpose the qudits were codified in the discretized transverse-momentum position of single photons, once they are sent through an aperture with d slits. We provide an experimental implementation of the method based in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which allows one to reduce the number of measurement settings to four since the d slits can be measured simultaneously. Furthermore, it can be adapted to consider the reconstruction of the unknown state from the outcome frequencies of $4d\ensuremath{-}3$ fixed projectors independently of the encoding or the nature of the quantum system, allowing one to implement the reconstruction method in a general experiment.