No Arabic abstract
We investigate whether paradigmatic measurements for quantum state tomography, namely mutually unbiased bases and symmetric informationally complete measurements, can be employed to certify quantum correlations. For this purpose, we identify a simple and noise-robust correlation witness for entanglement detection, steering and nonlocality that can be evaluated based on the outcome statistics obtained in the tomography experiment. This allows us to perform state tomography on entangled qutrits, a test of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering and a Bell inequality test, all within a single experiment. We also investigate the trade-off between quantum correlations and subsets of tomographically complete measurements as well as the quantification of entanglement in the different scenarios. Finally, we perform a photonics experiment in which we demonstrate quantum correlations under these flexible assumptions, namely with both parties trusted, one party untrusted and both parties untrusted.
A single photon incident on a beam splitter produces an entangled field state, and in principle could be used to violate a Bell-inequality, but such an experiment (without post-selection) is beyond the reach of current experiments. Here we consider the somewhat simpler task of demonstrating EPR-steering with a single photon (also without post-selection). That is, of demonstrating that Alices choice of measurement on her half of a single photon can affect the other half of the photon in Bobs lab, in a sense rigorously defined by us and Doherty [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 140402 (2007)]. Previous work by Lvovsky and co-workers [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 047903 (2004)] has addressed this phenomenon (which they called remote preparation) experimentally using homodyne measurements on a single photon. Here we show that, unfortunately, their experimental parameters do not meet the bounds necessary for a rigorous demonstration of EPR-steering with a single photon. However, we also show that modest improvements in the experimental parameters, and the addition of photon counting to the arsenal of Alices measurements, would be sufficient to allow such a demonstration.
Quantum state tomography is an indispensable but costly part of many quantum experiments. Typically, it requires measurements to be carried in a number of different settings on a fixed experimental setup. The collected data is often informationally overcomplete, with the amount of information redundancy depending on the particular set of measurement settings chosen. This raises a question about how should one optimally take data so that the number of measurement settings necessary can be reduced. Here, we cast this problem in terms of integer programming. For a given experimental setup, standard integer programming algorithms allow us to find the minimum set of readout operations that can realize a target tomographic task. We apply the method to certain basic and practical state tomographic problems in nuclear magnetic resonance experimental systems. The results show that, considerably less readout operations can be found using our technique than it was by using the previous greedy search strategy. Therefore, our method could be helpful for simplifying measurement schemes so as to minimize the experimental effort.
We present an example of quantum process tomography performed on a single solid state qubit. The qubit used is two energy levels of the triplet state in the Nitrogen-Vacancy defect in Diamond. Quantum process tomography is applied to a qubit which has been allowed to decohere for three different time periods. In each case the process is found in terms of the $chi$ matrix representation and the affine map representation. The discrepancy between experimentally estimated process and the closest physically valid process is noted.
Adaptive techniques have important potential for wide applications in enhancing precision of quantum parameter estimation. We present a recursively adaptive quantum state tomography (RAQST) protocol for finite dimensional quantum systems and experimentally implement the adaptive tomography protocol on two-qubit systems. In this RAQST protocol, an adaptive measurement strategy and a recursive linear regression estimation algorithm are performed. Numerical results show that our RAQST protocol can outperform the tomography protocols using mutually unbiased bases (MUB) and the two-stage MUB adaptive strategy even with the simplest product measurements. When nonlocal measurements are available, our RAQST can beat the Gill-Massar bound for a wide range of quantum states with a modest number of copies. We use only the simplest product measurements to implement two-qubit tomography experiments. In the experiments, we use error-compensation techniques to tackle systematic error due to misalignments and imperfection of wave plates, and achieve about 100-fold reduction of the systematic error. The experimental results demonstrate that the improvement of RAQST over nonadaptive tomography is significant for states with a high level of purity. Our results also show that this recursively adaptive tomography method is particularly effective for the reconstruction of maximally entangled states, which are important resources in quantum information.
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.