Quantum Entanglement It has been shown that entanglement is not necessary for ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography. Surprisingly, by presenting two examples of two-qutrit entangled states, it is found by Cheng-Jie Zhang and co-workers in article number 2100550 that there also exist some entangled states which are useless for ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography. Moreover, experimental verification is performed on the IBM platform ibmq_athens.
Quantum Entanglement It has been shown that entanglement is not necessary for ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography. Surprisingly, by presenting two examples of two-qutrit entangled states, it is found by Cheng-Jie Zhang and co-workers in article number 2100550 that there also exist some entangled states which are useless for ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography. Moreover, experimental verification is performed on the IBM platform ibmq_athens.
Abstract It is well known that one can extract all the information of an unknown quantum channel by means of quantum process tomography, such as standard quantum‐process tomography and ancilla‐assisted quantum process tomography (AAQPT). Furthermore, it is shown that entanglement is not necessary for AAQPT; there exist separable states that are also useful for it. Surprisingly, in this work we find that not all entangled states are useful for AAQPT; there also exist some entangled states that are useless. The realignment operation used in entanglement detection can be related to the question whether a bipartite state is useful for AAQPT. The relationship between them is derived and the process of extracting the complete information of an unknown channel by the realignment operation shown. Based on this relationship, examples of a two‐qutrit entangled state and a two‐qutrit bound entangled state are presented. Both of these two examples are entangled but they cannot be used for AAQPT. Last but not the least, experimental verification is been performed on the IBM platform.
Lu \textit{et al.} [Ann. Phys. (Berlin) \textbf{534}, 2100550 (2022)] posed the question of whether bound entangled states can be used for ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography (AAQPT). In this work, we answer this question in the affirmative by explicitly demonstrating that certain bound entangled states can be used for AAQPT. We further show that, although local filtering operations may improve the trace norm of the realignment criterion, they are essentially ineffective for AAQPT, as they render the resulting states \emph{unfaithful} and therefore unsuitable for reliable process reconstruction. Further, we investigate the efficiency of bound entangled states for AAQPT and establish quantitative bounds by comparing their performance with Werner and isotropic states. Our results therefore provide a new application of bound entangled states in the context of ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography.
Complete and precise characterization of a quantum dynamical process can be achieved via the method of quantum process tomography. Using a source of correlated photons, we have implemented several methods, each investigating a wide range of processes, e.g., unitary, decohering, and polarizing. One of these methods, ancilla-assisted process tomography (AAPT), makes use of an additional "ancilla system," and we have theoretically determined the conditions when AAPT is possible. Surprisingly, entanglement is not required. We present data obtained using both separable and entangled input states. The use of entanglement yields superior results, however.
Standard quantum process tomography on a d-dimensional input is performed by preparing several states of an input probe that then evolve under the action of the quantum channel corresponding to the progress. The final states of the probe are reconstructed by means of state tomography. An alternative is offered by ancilla-assisted process tomography: a single probe-ancilla state is used, and the correlations existing between probe and ancilla are exploited to fully reconstruct the information on the channel. In order for ancilla-assisted process tomography to be possible, the probe-ancilla input state does not need to be entangled, but still needs to have maximal operator Schmidt rank. Here we establish and analyze a framework for process tomography that interpolates between these two methods, aiming at exploiting any correlations that may exist between probe and ancilla to allow process tomography with as few input preparations as possible, when the probe-ancilla state may be operator-Schmidt-rank deficient. The main object of our investigation is the minimal number of initial local operations on the input probe for a given starting probe-ancilla state that are needed to allow process tomography. We prove that such a number scales inversely proportional to the operator Schmidt rank of the input probe-ancilla state for arbitrary local input processing. We also provide results for the case where this initial local processing is restricted to be a unitary rotation, in particular showing that the mentioned scaling is satisfied for pure input entangled states, and that in the case of mixed states there might be extreme cases where the fixed input probe-ancilla state provides information on a ≈d2/2-dimensional subspace of the operator space and a single additional input unitary rotation allows process tomography.
Entanglement-assisted quantum communication employs preshared entanglement between sender and receiver as a resource. We apply the same framework to quantum metrology, introducing shared entanglement between the probe and the ancilla in the preparation stage and allowing entangling operations at the measurement stage, i.e., using some entangled ancillary system that does not interact with the system to be sampled. This is known to be useless in the noiseless case, but was recently shown to be useful in the presence of noise [R. Demkowicz-Dobrzanski and L. Maccone, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 250801 (2014); W. D\"ur, M. Skotiniotis, F. Fr\"owis, and B. Kraus, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 080801 (2014); E. M. Kessler, I. Lovchinsky, A. O. Sushkov, and M. D. Lukin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 150802 (2014); R. Demkowicz-Dobrza\ifmmode \acute{n}\else \'{n}\fi{}ski and J. Kolodynski, New J. Phys. 15, 073043 (2013)]. Here we detail how and when it can be of use. For example, surprisingly it is useful when two channels are randomly alternated, for both of which ancillas do not help (depolarizing). We show that it is useful for all levels of noise for many noise models and propose a simple optical experiment to test these results.
The standard method of quantum state tomography (QST) relies on the measurement of a set of noncommuting observables, realized in a series of independent experiments. Ancilla-assisted QST (AAQST) proposed by Nieuwenhuizen and co-workers [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 120402 (2004)] greatly reduces the number of independent measurements by exploiting an ancilla register in a known initial state. In suitable conditions AAQST allows mapping out density matrix of an input register in a single experiment. Here we describe methods for explicit construction of AAQST experiments in multiqubit registers. We also report nuclear magnetic resonance studies on AAQST of (i) a two-qubit input register using a one-qubit ancilla in an isotropic liquid-state system and (ii) a three-qubit input register using a two-qubit ancilla register in a partially oriented system. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of AAQST in such multiqubit registers.