No Arabic abstract
With nowadays steadily growing quantum processors, it is required to develop new quantum tomography tools that are tailored for high-dimensional systems. In this work, we describe such a computational tool, based on recent ideas from non-convex optimization. The algorithm excels in the compressed-sensing-like setting, where only a few data points are measured from a low-rank or highly-pure quantum state of a high-dimensional system. We show that the algorithm can practically be used in quantum tomography problems that are beyond the reach of convex solvers, and, moreover, is faster than other state-of-the-art non-convex approaches. Crucially, we prove that, despite being a non-convex program, under mild conditions, the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the global minimum of the problem; thus, it constitutes a provable quantum state tomography protocol.
We propose a new quantum state reconstruction method that combines ideas from compressed sensing, non-convex optimization, and acceleration methods. The algorithm, called Momentum-Inspired Factored Gradient Descent (texttt{MiFGD}), extends the applicability of quantum tomography for larger systems. Despite being a non-convex method, texttt{MiFGD} converges emph{provably} to the true density matrix at a linear rate, in the absence of experimental and statistical noise, and under common assumptions. With this manuscript, we present the method, prove its convergence property and provide Frobenius norm bound guarantees with respect to the true density matrix. From a practical point of view, we benchmark the algorithm performance with respect to other existing methods, in both synthetic and real experiments performed on an IBMs quantum processing unit. We find that the proposed algorithm performs orders of magnitude faster than state of the art approaches, with the same or better accuracy. In both synthetic and real experiments, we observed accurate and robust reconstruction, despite experimental and statistical noise in the tomographic data. Finally, we provide a ready-to-use code for state tomography of multi-qubit systems.
We investigate quantum state tomography (QST) for pure states and quantum process tomography (QPT) for unitary channels via $adaptive$ measurements. For a quantum system with a $d$-dimensional Hilbert space, we first propose an adaptive protocol where only $2d-1$ measurement outcomes are used to accomplish the QST for $all$ pure states. This idea is then extended to study QPT for unitary channels, where an adaptive unitary process tomography (AUPT) protocol of $d^2+d-1$ measurement outcomes is constructed for any unitary channel. We experimentally implement the AUPT protocol in a 2-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance system. We examine the performance of the AUPT protocol when applied to Hadamard gate, $T$ gate ($pi/8$ phase gate), and controlled-NOT gate, respectively, as these gates form the universal gate set for quantum information processing purpose. As a comparison, standard QPT is also implemented for each gate. Our experimental results show that the AUPT protocol that reconstructing unitary channels via adaptive measurements significantly reduce the number of experiments required by standard QPT without considerable loss of fidelity.
The tomographic reconstruction of the state of a quantum-mechanical system is an essential component in the development of quantum technologies. We present an overview of different tomographic methods for determining the quantum-mechanical density matrix of a single qubit: (scaled) direct inversion, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), minimum Fisher information distance, and Bayesian mean estimation (BME). We discuss the different prior densities in the space of density matrices, on which both MLE and BME depend, as well as ways of including experimental errors and of estimating tomography errors. As a measure of the accuracy of these methods we average the trace distance between a given density matrix and the tomographic density matrices it can give rise to through experimental measurements. We find that the BME provides the most accurate estimate of the density matrix, and suggest using either the pure-state prior, if the system is known to be in a rather pure state, or the Bures prior if any state is possible. The MLE is found to be slightly less accurate. We comment on the extrapolation of these results to larger systems.
We study to what extent quantum algorithms can speed up solving convex optimization problems. Following the classical literature we assume access to a convex set via various oracles, and we examine the efficiency of reductions between the different oracles. In particular, we show how a separation oracle can be implemented using $tilde{O}(1)$ quantum queries to a membership oracle, which is an exponential quantum speed-up over the $Omega(n)$ membership queries that are needed classically. We show that a quantum computer can very efficiently compute an approximate subgradient of a convex Lipschitz function. Combining this with a simplification of recent classical work of Lee, Sidford, and Vempala gives our efficient separation oracle. This in turn implies, via a known algorithm, that $tilde{O}(n)$ quantum queries to a membership oracle suffice to implement an optimization oracle (the best known classical upper bound on the number of membership queries is quadratic). We also prove several lower bounds: $Omega(sqrt{n})$ quantum separation (or membership) queries are needed for optimization if the algorithm knows an interior point of the convex set, and $Omega(n)$ quantum separation queries are needed if it does not.
We present an experimentally feasible and efficient method for detecting entangled states with measurements that extend naturally to a tomographically complete set. Our detection criterion is based on measurements from subsets of a quantum 2-design, e.g., mutually unbiased bases or symmetric informationally complete states, and has several advantages over standard entanglement witnesses. First, as more detectors in the measurement are applied, there is a higher chance of witnessing a larger set of entangled states, in such a way that the measurement setting converges to a complete setup for quantum state tomography. Secondly, our method is twice as effective as standard witnesses in the sense that both upper and lower bounds can be derived. Thirdly, the scheme can be readily applied to measurement-device-independent scenarios.