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Quantum verification with few copies

Joshua Morris, Valeria Saggio, Aleksandra Gočanin, Borivoje Dakić

Published Sep 8, 2021• 2 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

As quantum technologies advance, the ability to generate increasingly large quantum states has experienced rapid development. In this context, the verification of large entangled systems represents one of the main challenges in the employment of such systems for reliable quantum information processing. Though the most complete technique is undoubtedly full tomography, the inherent exponential increase of experimental and post-processing resources with system size makes this approach unfeasible even at moderate scales. For this reason, there is currently an urgent need to develop novel methods that surpass these limitations. This review article presents novel techniques focusing on a fixed number of resources (sampling complexity), and thus prove suitable for systems of arbitrary dimension. Specifically, a probabilistic framework requiring at best only a single copy for entanglement detection is reviewed, together with the concept of shadow and selective quantum state tomography, which enables the estimation of arbitrary elements of an unknown state with a number of copies that is independent of the system's size. These hyper-efficient techniques define a dimensional demarcation for partial tomography and open a path for novel applications.

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As quantum technologies advance, the ability to generate increasingly large quantum states has experienced rapid development. In this context, the verification of large entangled systems represents one of the main challenges in the employment of such systems for reliable quantum information processing. Though the most complete technique is undoubtedly full tomography, the inherent exponential increase of experimental and post-processing resources with system size makes this approach unfeasible even at moderate scales. For this reason, there is currently an urgent need to develop novel methods that surpass these limitations. This review article presents novel techniques focusing on a fixed number of resources (sampling complexity), and thus prove suitable for systems of arbitrary dimension. Specifically, a probabilistic framework requiring at best only a single copy for entanglement detection is reviewed, together with the concept of shadow and selective quantum state tomography, which enables the estimation of arbitrary elements of an unknown state with a number of copies that is independent of the system's size. These hyper-efficient techniques define a dimensional demarcation for partial tomography and open a path for novel applications.
Abstract As quantum technologies advance, the ability to generate increasingly large quantum states has experienced rapid development. In this context, the verification and estimation of large entangled systems represent one of the main challenges in the employment of such systems for reliable quantum information processing. Though the most complete technique is undoubtedly full tomography, the inherent exponential increase of experimental and post‐processing resources with system size makes this approach infeasible even at moderate scales. For this reason, there is currently an urgent need to develop novel methods that surpass these limitations. This review article presents novel techniques focusing on a fixed number of resources (sampling complexity), and thus prove suitable for systems of arbitrary dimension. Specifically, a probabilistic framework requiring at best only a single copy for entanglement detection is reviewed, together with the concept of selective quantum state tomography, which enables the estimation of arbitrary elements of an unknown state with a number of copies that is low and independent of the system's size. These hyper‐efficient techniques define a dimensional demarcation for partial tomography and open a path for novel applications.
Although the realization of useful quantum computers poses significant challenges, swift progress in emerging quantum technologies is making this goal realistically approachable. In this context, one of the essential resources is quantum entanglement, which allows for quantum computations outperforming their classical counterparts. However, the task of entanglement detection is not always straightforward for several reasons. One of the main challenges is that standardly-used methods rapidly become unfeasible when dealing with quantum states containing more than a few qubits. Typically, this is due to the fact that a vast amount of measurements is needed on many copies of the state. Generally, it is not unusual to deal with a very limited number of state copies in experimental settings - in fact, this may be the case for many large quantum systems. In this article, an overview is provided of a probabilistic approach that enables high-confidence genuine multipartite entanglement detection using an exceptionally low number of state copies. Additionally, a study is presented that shows that this protocol remains efficient also in the presence of noise, thus confirming the practicality of the method for near-term quantum devices and its suitability for complex experimental settings.
Quantum state tomography is a technique in quantum information science used to reconstruct the density matrix of an unknown quantum state, providing complete information about the quantum state. It is of significant importance in fields such as quantum computation, quantum communication, and quantum simulation. However, as the size of the quantum system increases, the number of measurement settings and sampling requirements for quantum state tomography grow exponentially with the number of qubits. This not only makes experimental design and implementation more complex, but also exacerbates the consumption of experimental resources. These limitations severely hinder the application of state tomography in large-scale quantum systems. To reduce measurement settings and improve sampling efficiency, this study proposes a state tomography method based on auxiliary systems. This method can be implemented through either entanglement between the quantum system to be measured and a quantum auxiliary system or through correlation between the quantum system and a probabilistic classical auxiliary system. Measurements on the entire joint system enable more efficient extraction of information about the quantum state to be measured. This method relies on standard quantum gate operations and requires only two measurement settings, with a total sampling complexity of O(d2)O(d^2)O(d2), significantly simplifying experimental operations and measurement processes. Additionally, this study provides two schemes for measuring purity based on the proposed circuit, one of which achieves measurement precision at the Heisenberg limit. This study validates the effectiveness of the proposed method through a detailed theoretical analysis, a series of numerical simulations, and experiments.
Shadow Tomography is a fundamental problem in quantum information theory. Given multiple copies of an unknown ddd-dimensional quantum state ρρρ and a known collection of observables E1,…,EME_1,\ldots,E_ME1​,…,EM​, the goal is to estimate all expectation values {Tr(ρEi)}i=1M\{\text{Tr}(ρE_i)\}_{i=1}^M{Tr(ρEi​)}i=1M​ to additive accuracy ε\varepsilonε with probability at least 1−δ1-δ1−δ. An elusive open question from the seminal shadow tomography work of Aaronson is whether this task admits a dimension-independent sample complexity with only polylogarithmic dependence on MMM, as suggested by the best-known lower bounds. In this work, we propose two different quantum protocols for shadow tomography with the best sample complexity O(log⁡(M)log⁡(M/δ)ε2), O\left( \frac{\log(M)\log(M/δ)}{\varepsilon^2} \right), O(ε2log(M)log(M/δ)​), which is polylogarithmic in the number of observables and independent of the dimension of the unknown state, thereby answering Aaronson's original question while also providing an exponential improvement in the prior best dimension independent sample complexity of shadow tomography from Sinha (STOC 2025) and, more recently, Chen, O'Donnell, Pelecanos, and Wright. Our approach first reduces the general shadow tomography problem to a finite-ensemble estimation problem via a minimax argument. We then develop an observable-independent protocol that repeatedly applies the pretty-good measurement while updating the prior distribution over the finite ensemble according to the measurement outcomes. A tail analysis of the resulting estimation error yields simultaneous accuracy guarantees for all observables and a cubic-logarithmic upper bound. We also introduce a refined recovery-label measurement for the same finite ensemble, which yields the bound in our main theorem.
We introduce the concept of selective quantum state tomography or SQST, a tomographic scheme that enables a user to estimate arbitrary elements of an unknown quantum state using a fixed measurement record. We demonstrate how this may be done with the following notable advantages (i) a number of state copies that depends only on the desired precision of the estimation, rather than the dimension of the unknown state; (ii) a similar reduction in the requisite classical memory and computational cost; (iii) an approach to state tomography using O(ε−2log⁡d)O(ε^{-2}\log d)O(ε−2logd) state copies for maximum norm error εεε, as well as achieving nearly optimal bounds for full tomography with independent measurements. As an immediate extension to this technique we proceed to show that SQST can be used to generate an universal data sample, of fixed and dimension independent size, from which one can extract the mean values from a continuous class of operators on demand.
Abstract One of the main challenges of quantum information is the reliable verification of quantum entanglement. The conventional detection schemes require repeated measurement on a large number of identically prepared systems. This is hard to achieve in practice when dealing with large-scale entangled quantum systems. In this letter we formulate verification as a decision procedure, i.e., entanglement is seen as the ability of quantum system to answer certain “yes-no questions”. We show that for a variety of large quantum states even a single copy suffices to detect entanglement with a high probability by using local measurements. For example, a single copy of a 16-qubit k-producible state or one copy of 24-qubit linear cluster state suffices to verify entanglement with more than 95% confidence. Our method is applicable to many important classes of states, such as cluster states or ground states of local Hamiltonians in general.