Characterizing quantum systems is a fundamental task that enables the development of quantum technologies. Various approaches, ranging from full tomography to instances of classical shadows, have been proposed to this end. However, quantum states that are being prepared in practice often involve families of quantum states characterized by continuous parameters, such as the time evolution of a quantum state. In this work, we extend the foundations of quantum state tomography to parametrized quantum states. We introduce a framework that unifies different notions of tomography and use it to establish a natural figure of merit for tomography of parametrized quantum states. Building on this, we provide an explicit algorithm that combines signal processing techniques with a tomography scheme to recover an approximation to the parametrized quantum state equipped with explicit guarantees. Our algorithm uses techniques from compressed sensing to exploit structure in the parameter dependence and operates with a “plug-and-play” nature, using the underlying tomography scheme as a black box. In an analogous fashion, we derive a figure of merit that applies to parametrized quantum channels. Substituting the state tomography scheme with a scheme for process tomography in our algorithm, we then obtain a protocol for tomography of parametrized quantum channels. We showcase our algorithm with two examples of shadow tomography of states time evolved under an NMR Hamiltonian and a free-fermionic Hamiltonian.
Characterizing quantum systems is a fundamental task that enables the development of quantum technologies. Various approaches, ranging from full tomography to instances of classical shadows, have been proposed to this end. However, quantum states that are being prepared in practice often involve families of quantum states characterized by continuous parameters, such as the time evolution of a quantum state. In this work, we extend the foundations of quantum state tomography to parametrized quantum states. We introduce a framework that unifies different notions of tomography and use it to establish a natural figure of merit for tomography of parametrized quantum states. Building on this, we provide an explicit algorithm that combines signal processing techniques with a tomography scheme to recover an approximation to the parametrized quantum state equipped with explicit guarantees. Our algorithm uses techniques from compressed sensing to exploit structure in the parameter dependence and operates with a “plug-and-play” nature, using the underlying tomography scheme as a black box. In an analogous fashion, we derive a figure of merit that applies to parametrized quantum channels. Substituting the state tomography scheme with a scheme for process tomography in our algorithm, we then obtain a protocol for tomography of parametrized quantum channels. We showcase our algorithm with two examples of shadow tomography of states time evolved under an NMR Hamiltonian and a free-fermionic Hamiltonian.
Characterizing quantum systems is a fundamental task that enables the development of quantum technologies. Various approaches, ranging from full tomography to instances of classical shadows, have been proposed to this end. However, quantum states that are being prepared in practice often involve families of quantum states characterized by continuous parameters, such as the time evolution of a quantum state. In this work, we extend the foundations of quantum state tomography to parametrized quantum states. We introduce a framework that unifies different notions of tomography and use it to establish a natural figure of merit for tomography of parametrized quantum states. Building on this, we provide an explicit algorithm that combines signal processing techniques with a tomography scheme to recover an approximation to the parametrized quantum state equipped with explicit guarantees. Our algorithm uses techniques from compressed sensing to exploit structure in the parameter dependence and operates with a plug and play nature, using the underlying tomography scheme as a black box. In an analogous fashion, we derive a figure of merit that applies to parametrized quantum channels. Substituting the state tomography scheme with a scheme for process tomography in our algorithm, we then obtain a protocol for tomography of parametrized quantum channels. We showcase our algorithm with two examples of shadow tomography of states time-evolved under an NMR Hamiltonian and a free fermionic Hamiltonian.
Quantum process tomography is a critical capability for building quantum computers, enabling quantum networks, and understanding quantum sensors. Like quantum state tomography, the process tomography of an arbitrary quantum channel requires a number of measurements that scales exponentially in the number of quantum bits affected. However, the recent field of shadow tomography, applied to quantum states, has demonstrated the ability to extract key information about a state with only polynomially many measurements. In this work, we apply the concepts of shadow state tomography to the challenge of characterizing quantum processes. We make use of the Choi isomorphism to directly apply rigorous bounds from shadow state tomography to shadow process tomography, and we find additional bounds on the number of measurements that are unique to process tomography. Our results, which include algorithms for implementing shadow process tomography, enable new techniques including evaluation of channel concatenation and the application of channels to shadows of quantum states. This provides a dramatic improvement for understanding large-scale quantum systems.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is a fundamental task in quantum information science that aims to reconstruct unknown quantum states from measurement data. However, the exponential growth of Hilbert-space dimension with system size makes full tomography of general quantum states statistically and computationally prohibitive. This challenge has motivated extensive research on structured quantum state tomography, where prior structure, such as low-rankness, tensor-network representations, shallow quantum circuits, and neural quantum states, can substantially reduce the effective degrees of freedom and enable scalable recovery. In this review, we provide a unified perspective on QST for structured quantum states through three closely related themes: compact state representations, measurement design, and computational algorithms. After reviewing common models for structured quantum states, we survey existing work on geometric preservation properties of measurement frameworks, ranging from informationally complete POVMs to randomized measurements, and their implications for sample complexity. On the algorithmic side, we review optimization methods for reconstructing structured quantum states from empirical measurements. By connecting QST with broader principles from compressive sensing, matrix sensing, and structured inverse problems, this survey highlights common theoretical foundations underlying sample complexity, measurement efficiency, and scalable recovery.
Quantum process tomography is a powerful tool for understanding quantum channels and characterizing the properties of quantum devices. Inspired by recent advances using classical shadows in quantum state tomography [H.-Y. Huang, R. Kueng, and J. Preskill, .], we have developed ShadowQPT, a classical shadow method for quantum process tomography. We introduce two related formulations with and without ancilla qubits. ShadowQPT stochastically reconstructs the Choi matrix of the device allowing for an classical evaluation of the device on arbitrary inputs with respect to arbitrary outputs. Using shadows, we then show how to compute overlaps, generate all k -weight reduced processes, and perform reconstruction via Hamiltonian learning. These latter two tasks are efficient for large systems as the number of quantum measurements needed scales only logarithmically with the number of qubits. A number of additional approximations and improvements are developed, including the use of a pair-factorized Clifford shadow and a series of postprocessing techniques that significantly enhance the accuracy for recovering the quantum channel. We have implemented ShadowQPT using both Pauli and Clifford measurements on the IonQ trapped ion quantum computer for quantum processes up to n=4 qubits, and we achieved good performance. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
This thesis presents developments in the theory and application of quantum learning.The first two chapters fall under the head of classical shadow tomography, a randomized measurement technique which estimates a large number of expectation values effectively in parallel. In the first chapter on this topic, we extend classical shadow state tomography to the characterization of quantum channels. We prove that with a simple protocol involving randomized measurement of randomly generated input states evolved through channel, one can estimate many channel properties in parallel, with rigorous guarantees on the sample complexity required. In the next chapter, we bring together finite-depth classical shadows, derandomization, and tensor network simulation to present an algorithm for tailoring a sequence of measurements to a set of observables of interest, demonstrating the effectiveness of our technique for a number of tasks in quantum chemistry and simulation. The second part of this thesis presents a step toward applying ideas from quantum learning to quantum error correction. We investigate the use of prior information on qubit error rates in the decoding task, showing that prior information can significantly change decoder performance when a small number of qubits have high error rates. We present a protocol to learn the location of error-prone sites from decoding data in real time, and then apply this in turn to develop in situ protocol for calibration of gates while processing logical information.
Quantum shadow tomography based on the classical shadow representation provides an efficient way to estimate properties of an unknown quantum state without performing a full quantum state tomography. In scenarios where estimating the expectation values for only certain classes of observables is required, obtaining information about the entire density matrix is unnecessary. We propose a partial quantum shadow tomography protocol that estimates a subset of density matrix elements relevant to the expectation values of structured observables. Specifically, we identify specific subsets of the tomographically complete set Cl(2)⊗n and a simple pseudo-inverse of the associated channel, which can be used to estimate all elements of the density matrix with the same active order. By restricting the protocol to smaller subsets of single-qubit Pauli measurements, it becomes experimentally more efficient. We demonstrate the advantage over unitary designs, such as the Clifford, full Pauli basis, and methods utilizing mutually unbiased bases, by analytically deriving error bounds and numerically evaluating the protocol on structured operators. We experimentally demonstrate the partial shadow estimation scheme for a wide class of two-qubit states (pure, entangled, and mixed) in the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) platform. The full density matrix, reconstructed experimentally by combining different partial estimators, achieves fidelities around 99%.