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Register a new userDirect measurement of the density matrix of a quantum system
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Added by
Guillaume Thekkadath
Publication date
2016
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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One drawback of conventional quantum state tomography is that it does not readily provide access to single density matrix elements, since it requires a global reconstruction. Here we experimentally demonstrate a scheme that can be used to directly measure individual density matrix elements of general quantum states. The scheme relies on measuring a sequence of three observables, each complementary to the last. The first two measurements are made weak to minimize the disturbance they cause to the state, while the final measurement is strong. We perform this joint measurement on polarized photons in pure and mixed states to directly measure their density matrix. The weak measurements are achieved using two walk-off crystals, each inducing a polarization-dependent spatial shift that couples the spatial and polarization degree of freedom of the photons. This direct measurement method provides an operational meaning to the density matrix and promises to be especially useful for large dimensional states.
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Direct measurement protocol allows reconstructing specific elements of the density matrix of a quantum state without using quantum state tomography. However, the direct measurement protocols to date are primarily based on weak or strong measurements with ancillary pointers, which interacts with the investigated system to extract information about the specified elements. Here we present a new direct measurement protocol based on phase-shifting technique which do not need ancillary pointers. In this protocol, at most six different projective measurements suffice to determine any specific element of an unknown quantum density matrix. A concrete quantum circuit to implement the phase-shifting measurement protocol for multi-qubit states is provided, where the circuit is composed of just single-qubit gates and two multi-qubit controlled-phase gates. This protocol is also extended to the continuous-variable cases for directly measuring the Wigner function. Furthermore, we show that the protocol has the advantage of reducing measurement and device complexity in the task of measuring the complete density matrix compared to quantum state tomography in some quantum experiments. Our method provides an efficient way to characterize arbitrary quantum systems, which may be used to predict various properties of a quantum system and find applications in quantum information processing.
Entanglement and wave function description are two of the core concepts that make quantum mechanics such a unique theory. A method to directly measure the wave function, using Weak Values, was demonstrated by Lundeen et al., Nature textbf{474}, 188(2011). However, it is not applicable to a scenario of two disjoint systems, where nonlocal entanglement can be a crucial element since that requires obtaining the Weak Values of nonlocal observables. Here, for the first time, we propose a method to directly measure a nonlocal wave function of a bipartite system, using Modular Values. The method is experimentally implemented for a photon pair in a hyper-entangled state, i.e. entangled both in polarization and momentum degrees of freedom.
We propose a scheme to measure the quantum state of photons in a cavity. The proposal is based on the concept of quantum weak values and applies equally well to both the solid-state circuit and atomic cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) systems. The proposed scheme allows us to access directly the superposition components in Fock state basis, rather than the Wigner function as usual in phase space. Moreover, the separate access feature held in the direct scheme does not require a global reconstruction for the quantum state, which provides a particular advantage beyond the conventional method of quantum state tomography.
The time-symmetric formalism endows the weak measurement and its outcome, the weak value, many unique features. In particular, it allows a direct tomography of quantum states without resort to complicated reconstruction algorithms and provides an operational meaning to wave functions and density matrices. To date the direct tomography only takes the forward direction of the weak measurement. Here we propose the direct tomography of a measurement apparatus by combining the backward direction of weak measurement and retrodictive description of quantum measurement. As an experimental demonstration, the scheme is applied to the characterization of both projective measurements and general positive operator-valued measures with a photonic setup. Our work provides new insight on the symmetry between quantum states and measurements, as well as an efficient method to characterize a measurement apparatus.
Coherent feedback control of quantum systems has demonstrable advantages over measurement-based control, but so far there has been little work done on coherent estimators and more specifically coherent observers. Coherent observers are input the coherent output of a specified quantum plant, and are designed such that some subset of the observer and plants expectation values converge in the asymptotic limit. We previously developed a class of mean tracking (MT) observers for open harmonic oscillators that only converged in mean position and momentum; Here we develop a class of covariance matrix tracking (CMT) coherent observers that track both the mean and covariance matrix of a quantum plant. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a CMT observer, and find there are more restrictions on a CMT observer than there are on a MT observer. We give examples where we demonstrate how to design a CMT observer and show it can be used to track properties like the entanglement of a plant. As the CMT observer provides more quantum information than a MT observer, we expect it will have greater application in future coherent feedback schemes mediated by coherent observers. Investigation of coherent quantum estimators and observers is important in the ongoing discussion of quantum measurement; As they provide estimation of a systems quantum state without explicit use of the measurement postulate in their derivation.
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