Alexander M. Dalzell, Sam McArdle, Mario Berta, Przemyslaw Bienias, Chi-Fang Chen, András Gilyén, Connor T. Hann, Michael J. Kastoryano, Emil T. Khabiboulline, Aleksander Kubica, Grant Salton, Samson Wang, Fernando G. S. L. Brandão
This chapter covers quantum tomography, a quantum algorithmic primitive that enables a quantum algorithm to learn a full classical description of a quantum state. Generally, the goal of a quantum tomography procedure is to obtain this description using as few copies of the state as possible. The optimal number of copies may depend on what kind of measurements are allowed and what error metric is being used, and in most cases, quantum tomography procedures have been developed with provably optimal complexity.
This chapter covers quantum tomography, a quantum algorithmic primitive that enables a quantum algorithm to learn a full classical description of a quantum state. Generally, the goal of a quantum tomography procedure is to obtain this description using as few copies of the state as possible. The optimal number of copies may depend on what kind of measurements are allowed and what error metric is being used, and in most cases, quantum tomography procedures have been developed with provably optimal complexity.
Quantum state tomography is a powerful but resource-intensive, general solution for numerous quantum information processing tasks. This motivates the design of robust tomography procedures that use relevant resources as sparingly as possible. Important cost factors include the number of state copies and measurement settings, as well as classical postprocessing time and memory. In this work, we present and analyze an online tomography algorithm designed to optimize all the aforementioned resources at the cost of a worse dependence on accuracy. The protocol is the first to give provably optimal performance in terms of rank and dimension for state copies, measurement settings and memory. Classical runtime is also reduced substantially and numerical experiments demonstrate a favorable comparison with other state-of-the-art techniques. Further improvements are possible by executing the algorithm on a quantum computer, giving a quantum speedup for quantum state tomography.
Quantum measurements are probabilistic and, in general, provide only partial information about the underlying quantum state. Obtaining a full classical description of an unknown quantum state requires the analysis of several different measurements, a task known as quantum-state tomography. Here we analyse the ultimate achievable performance in the tomography of continuous-variable systems, such as bosonic and quantum optical systems. We prove that tomography of these systems is extremely inefficient in terms of time resources, much more so than tomography of finite-dimensional systems such as qubits. Not only does the minimum number of state copies needed for tomography scale exponentially with the number of modes, but, even for low-energy states, it also scales unfavourably with the trace-distance error between the original state and its estimated classical description. On a more positive note, we prove that the tomography of Gaussian states is efficient by establishing a bound on the trace-distance error made when approximating a Gaussian state from knowledge of the first and second moments within a specified error bound. Last, we demonstrate that the tomography of non-Gaussian states prepared through Gaussian unitaries and a few local non-Gaussian evolutions is efficient and experimentally feasible.
Quantum measurements are probabilistic and, in general, provide only partial information about the underlying quantum state. Obtaining a full classical description of an unknown quantum state requires the analysis of several different measurements, a task known as quantum-state tomography. Here we analyse the ultimate achievable performance in the tomography of continuous-variable systems, such as bosonic and quantum optical systems. We prove that tomography of these systems is extremely inefficient in terms of time resources, much more so than tomography of finite-dimensional systems such as qubits. Not only does the minimum number of state copies needed for tomography scale exponentially with the number of modes, but, even for low-energy states, it also scales unfavourably with the trace-distance error between the original state and its estimated classical description. On a more positive note, we prove that the tomography of Gaussian states is efficient by establishing a bound on the trace-distance error made when approximating a Gaussian state from knowledge of the first and second moments within a specified error bound. Last, we demonstrate that the tomography of non-Gaussian states prepared through Gaussian unitaries and a few local non-Gaussian evolutions is efficient and experimentally feasible.
We study the sample complexity of shadow tomography in the high-precision regime under realistic measurement constraints. Given an unknown d-dimensional quantum state ρ and a known set of observables {Oi}i=1m, the goal is to estimate expectation values {tr(Oiρ)}i=1m to accuracy ε in Lp-norm, using possibly adaptive measurements that act on O(polylog(d)) number of copies of ρ at a time. We focus on the regime where ε is below an instance-dependent threshold.
Our main contribution is an instance-optimal characterization of the sample complexity as Θ~(Γp/ε2), where Γp is a function of {Oi}i=1m defined via an optimization formula involving the inverse Fisher information matrix. Previously, tight bounds were known only in special cases, e.g. Pauli shadow tomography with L∞-norm error. Concretely, we first analyze a simpler oblivious variant where the goal is to estimate an observable of the form ∑i=1mαiOi with ∥α∥q=1 (where q is dual to p) revealed after the measurement. For single-copy measurements, we obtain a sample complexity of Θ(Γpob/ε2). We then show Θ~(Γp/ε2) is necessary and sufficient for the original problem, with the lower bound applying to unbiased, bounded estimators. Our upper bounds rely on a two-step algorithm combining coarse tomography with local estimation. Notably, Γ∞ob=Γ∞. In both cases, allowing c-copy measurements improves the sample complexity by at most Ω(1/c).
Our results establish a quantitative correspondence between quantum learning and metrology, unifying asymptotic metrological limits with finite-sample learning guarantees.
Quantum computation depends on quantum entanglement, a correlation between subsystems that cannot occur classically. A variety of theoretical measures exist for quantifying the degree entanglement in such schemes, all of which are functions of the system density matrix. How can the entanglement be measured experimentally? Using quantum tomography techniques developed for two photon entangled states, the density matrix can be reconstructed from the appropriate experimental data. In this case the state tomography gives the complete characterization of the physical system (for the relevant degree of freedom, such as spin or polarization). It gives information on both the degree of nonclassical correlation, that is entanglement, as well as the amount of decoherence in the system. In this proceedings we discuss the general state tomography procedure required to characterize a few qubit quantum computer, for any architecture.
We study single-copy shadow tomography in the adversarial robust setting, where the goal is to learn the expectation values of M observables O1,…,OM with ε accuracy, but γ-fraction of the outcomes can be arbitrarily corrupted by an adversary. We show that all non-adaptive shadow tomography algorithms must incur an error of ε=Ω~(γmin{M,d}) for some choice of observables, even with unlimited copies. Unfortunately, the classical shadows algorithm by [HKP20] and naive algorithms that directly measure each observable suffer even more. We design an algorithm that achieves an error of ε=O~(γmaxi∈[M]∥Oi∥HS), which nearly matches our worst-case error lower bound for M≥d and guarantees better accuracy when the observables have stronger structure. Remarkably, the algorithm only needs n=γ21log(M/δ) copies to achieve that error with probability at least 1−δ, matching the sample complexity of the classical shadows algorithm that achieves the same error without corrupted measurement outcomes. Our algorithm is conceptually simple and easy to implement. Classical simulation for fidelity estimation shows that our algorithm enjoys much stronger robustness than [HKP20] under adversarial noise. Finally, based on a reduction from full-state tomography to shadow tomography, we prove that for rank r states, both the near-optimal asymptotic error of ε=O~(γr) and copy complexity O~(dr2/ε2)=O~(dr/γ2) can be achieved for adversarially robust state tomography, closing the large gap in [ABCL25] where optimal error can only be achieved using pseudo-polynomial number of copies in d.