Extracting tomographic information about quantum states is a crucial task in the quest towards devising high-precision quantum devices. Current schemes typically require measurement devices for tomography that are a priori calibrated to a high precision. Ironically, the accuracy of the measurement calibration is fundamentally limited by the accuracy of state preparation, establishing a vicious cycle. Here, we prove that this cycle can be broken and the fundamental dependence on the measurement devices significantly relaxed. We show that exploiting the natural low-rank structure of quantum states of interest suffices to arrive at a highly scalable blind tomography scheme with a classically efficient post-processing algorithm. We further improve the efficiency of our scheme by making use of the sparse structure of the calibrations. This is achieved by relaxing the blind quantum tomography problem to the task of de-mixing a sparse sum of low-rank quantum states. Building on techniques from model-based compressed sensing, we prove that the proposed algorithm recovers a low-rank quantum state and the calibration provided that the measurement model exhibits a restricted isometry property. For generic measurements, we show that our algorithm requires a close-to-optimal number measurement settings for solving the blind tomography task. Complementing these conceptual and mathematical insights, we numerically demonstrate that blind quantum tomography is possible by exploiting low-rank assumptions in a practical setting inspired by an implementation of trapped ions using constrained alternating optimization.
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