The reconstruction of quantum states from a sufficient set of experimental data can be achieved with arbitrarily weak measurement interactions. Since such weak measurements have negligible back-action, the quantum state reconstruction is also valid for the post-selected sub-ensembles usually considered in weak measurement paradoxes. It is shown that post-selection can then be identified with a statistical decomposition of the initial density matrix into transient density matrices conditioned by the anticipated measurement outcomes. This result indicates that it is possible to ascribe the properties determined by the final measurement outcome to each individual quantum system before the measurement has taken place. The ``collapse'' of the pure state wavefunction in a measurement can then be understood in terms of the classical ``collapse'' of a probability distribution as new information becomes available.
We present a general formalism for charecterizing 2-time quantum states, describing pre- and post-selected quantum systems. The most general 2-time state is characterized by a `density vector' that is independent of measurements performed between the preparation and post-selection. We provide a method for performing tomography of an unknown 2-time density vector. This procedure, which cannot be implemented by weak or projective measurements, brings new insight to the fundamental role played by Kraus operators in quantum measurements. Finally, after showing that general states and measurements …
In the paper we discuss possible applications of the so-called stroboscopic tomography (stroboscopic observability) to selected decoherence models of 2-level quantum systems. The main assumption behind our reasoning claims that the time evolution of the analyzed system is given by a master equation of the form $\dotρ = \mathbb{L} ρ$ and the macroscopic information about the system is provided by the mean values $m_i (t_j) = Tr(Q_i ρ(t_j))$ of certain observables $\{Q_i\}_{i=1} ^r $ measured at different time instants $\{t_j\}_{j=1}^p$. The goal of the stroboscopic tomography is to establish th…
We examine the problem of finding the minimum number of Pauli measurements needed to uniquely determine an arbitrary $n$-qubit pure state among all quantum states. We show that only $11$ Pauli measurements are needed to determine an arbitrary two-qubit pure state compared to the full quantum state tomography with $16$ measurements, and only $31$ Pauli measurements are needed to determine an arbitrary three-qubit pure state compared to the full quantum state tomography with $64$ measurements. We demonstrate that our protocol is robust under depolarizing error with simulated random pure states. …
We propose a simple scheme to reduce readout errors in experiments on quantum systems with finite number of measurement outcomes. Our method relies on performing classical post-processing which is preceded by Quantum Detector Tomography, i.e., the reconstruction of a Positive-Operator Valued Measure (POVM) describing the given quantum measurement device. If the measurement device is affected only by an invertible classical noise, it is possible to correct the outcome statistics of future experiments performed on the same device. To support the practical applicability of this scheme for near-te…
We present efficient circuits that can be used for the phase space tomography of quantum states. The circuits evaluate individual values or selected averages of the Wigner, Kirkwood and Husimi distributions. These quantum gate arrays can be programmed by initializing appropriate computational states. The Husimi circuit relies on a subroutine that is also interesting in its own right: the efficient preparation of a coherent state, which is the ground state of the Harper Hamiltonian.
Recently, Bendersky \emph{et al.} developed a method to complete the task of characterizing an arbitrary $χ$ matrix element in a scalable way, Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. \textbf{100}, 190403(2008), where an auxiliary system was needed. In present work, we shall show that the same task can also be completed within the scheme of standard quantum process tomography (SQPT) where there is no requirement for ancilla. Our method depends on two observations: With the elaborately chosen operators basis, the SQPT may have an economical form where a single run of experiment, in which we measure the expectatio…
In this comment on S.Lloyd, et al, Phys.Rev.Lett. 106, 040403 (2011), we show that modelling closed timelike curves (CTCs) as post-selected teleportation allows signalling to past times before the creation of the CTC and allows information paradoxes to form.
In this paper, we analyze a potential procedure based on the combination of an alternative information encoding system inside the state of an electromagnetic mode and on continuous-variable post-selected teleportation, for speed up computational power of a classic architecture up to resolution of problems in PSPACE.
Using the existing classification of all alternatives to the measurement postulates of quantum theory we study the properties of bi-partite systems in these alternative theories. We prove that in all these theories the purification principle is violated, meaning that some mixed states are not the reduction of a pure state in a larger system. This allows us to derive the measurement postulates of quantum theory from the structure of pure states and reversible dynamics, and the requirement that the purification principle holds. The violation of the purification principle implies that there is so…
We introduce a self-learning tomographic technique in which the experiment guides itself to an estimate of its own state. Self-guided quantum tomography (SGQT) uses measurements to directly test hypotheses in an iterative algorithm which converges to the true state. We demonstrate through simulation on many qubits that SGQT is a more efficient and robust alternative to the usual paradigm of taking a large amount of informationally complete data and solving the inverse problem of post-processed state estimation.
We used quantum process tomography to investigate and identify the function of a nonideal two-qubit quantum-state filters subject to various degree of decoherence. We present a simple decoherence model that explains the experimental results and point out that a beamsplitter followed by a post-selection process is not, as commonly believed, a singlet-state filter. In the ideal case it is a triplet-state filter.
The deployment of intermediate- and large-scale quantum devices necessitates the development of efficient full state tomographical techniques for quantum benchmarks. Here, we introduce a matrix filling-based method for tomography of pure quantum states, called the matrix-completion quantum state tomography. This method requires only 2n + 1 local Pauli operators and minimal post-processing for n-qubit states. Numerical results show that our method is highly efficient on superconducting real quantum devices and achieves better fidelity estimates of multiqubit quantum states as compared to contem…
QICI Quantum Information and Computation Initiative, School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学计算与数据科学学院量子信息与计算倡议）；Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University（广岛大学先进理工学研究科）
An expression is proposed for the quantum mechanical state of a pre- and post-selected ensemble, which is an ensemble determined by the final as well as the initial state of the quantum systems involved. It is shown that the probabilities calculated from the proposed state agree with previous expressions, for cases where they both apply. The same probabilities are found when they are calculated in the forward- or reverse-time directions. This work was prompted by several problems raised by Shimony recently in relation to the state, and time symmetry, of pre- and post-selected ensembles.
Weak measurements offer new insights into the behavior of quantum systems. Combined with post-selection, quantum mechanics predicts a range of new experimentally testable phenomena. In this paper I consider weak measurements performed on time-dependent pre- and post-selected ensembles, with emphasis on the decay of excited states. The results show that the standard exponential decay law is a limiting case of a more general law that depends on both the time of post-selection and the choice of final state. The generalized law is illustrated for two interesting choices of post-selection.
A common problem in Bell type experiments is the well-known detection loophole: if the detection efficiencies are not perfect and if one simply post-selects the conclusive events, one might observe a violation of a Bell inequality, even though a local model could have explained the experimental results. In this paper, we analyze the set of all post-selected correlations that can be explained by a local model, and show that it forms a polytope, larger than the Bell local polytope. We characterize the facets of this post-selected local polytope in the CHSH scenario, where two parties have binary…
Quantum state tomography, the ability to deduce the state of a quantum system from measured data, is the gold standard for verification and benchmarking of quantum devices. It has been realized in systems with few components, but for larger systems it becomes infeasible because the number of quantum measurements and the amount of computation required to process them grows exponentially in the system size. Here we show that we can do exponentially better than direct state tomography for a wide range of quantum states, in particular those that are well approximated by a matrix product state ansa…
In analogy with the usual state estimation problem, we introduce the problem of state estimation for a pre- and post-selected ensemble. The problem has fundamental physical significance since, as argued by Y. Aharonov and collaborators, pre- and post-selected ensembles are the most basic quantum ensembles. Two new features are shown to appear: 1) information is flowing to the measuring device both from the past and from the future; 2)because of the post-selection, certain measurement outcomes can be forced never to occur. Due to these features, state estimation in such ensembles is dramaticall…
Weak value is increasingly acknowledged as an important research tool for probing quantum pre- and post-selected ensembles, where some extraordinary phenomena occur. We generalize this concept to the broader notion of "weak potential" which enables predicting the interactions between particles when one of them is pre-/post-selected and the interaction potential is small. A harmonic oscillator is considered, undergoing weak position and momentum measurements between strong position measurement, and shown to possess peculiar physical properties, affecting the momentum rather than the position of…
Using a Bayesian methodology, we introduce the maximum a posteriori~(MAP) estimator for quantum state and process tomography. The maximum likelihood, hedged maximum likelihood, maximum likelihood-maximum entropy estimator, and estimators of this general type, can be viewed as special cases of the MAP estimator. The MAP, like the Bayes mean estimator includes prior knowledge, however for cases of interest to tomography can take advantage of convex optimization tools making it numerically easier to compute. We show how the MAP and other Bayesian quantum state estimators can be corrected for nois…
Closed expressions are derived for the quantum measurement statistics of pre-and postselected gaussian particle beams. The weakness of the pre-selection step is shown to compete with the non-orthogonality of post-selection in a transparent way. The approach is shown to be useful in analyzing post-selection-based signal amplification, allowing measurements to be extended far beyond the range of validity of the well-known Aharonov-Albert-Vaidman limit.
A Bayesian approach to quantum process tomography has yet to be fully developed due to the lack of appropriate probability distributions on the space of quantum channels. Here, by associating the Choi matrix form of a completely positive, trace preserving (CPTP) map with a particular space of matrices with orthonormal columns, called a Stiefel manifold, we present two parametric probability distributions on the space of CPTP maps that enable Bayesian analysis of process tomography. The first is a probability distribution that has an average Choi matrix as a sufficient statistic. The second is …
The variance of an observable in a pre-selected quantum system, which is always real and non-negative, appears as an increase in the probe wave packet width in indirect measurements. Extending this framework to pre- and post-selected systems, we formulate a complex-valued counterpart of the variance called "weak variance." In our formulation, the real and imaginary parts of the weak variance appear as changes in the probe wave packet width in the vertical-horizontal and diagonal-antidiagonal directions, respectively, on the quadrature phase plane. Using an optical system, we experimentally dem…
We define a quantum entropy conditioned on post-selection which has the von Neumann entropy of pure states as a special case. This conditional entropy can take negative values which is consistent with part of a quantum system containing less information than the whole which can be in a pure state. The definition is based on generalised density operators for postselected ensembles. The corresponding density operators are consistent with the quantum generalisation of classical conditional probabilities following Dirac s formalism of quasiprobability distributions.
We discuss the concept of connection states (or connection matrices) that describe posterior ensembles, post-selected according to the outcomes of a quantum measurement. Connection matrices allow one to obtain results of any weak and some non-weak pre- and post-selected measurements, in the same manner as density matrices allow one to predict the results of conventional quantum measurements. Connection matrices are direct extensions of the density matrices and are generally non-Hermitian, which we show to be a direct consequence of quantum complementarity. This implies that the ultimate reason…
Various reconstructions of finite-dimensional quantum mechanics result in a formally real Jordan algebra A and a last step remains to conclude that A is the self-adjoint part of a C*-algebra. Using a quantum logical setting, it is shown that this can be achieved by postulating that there is a locally tomographic model for a composite system consisting of two copies of the same system. Local tomography is a feature of classical probability theory and quantum mechanics; it means that state tomography for a multipartite system can be performed by simultaneous measurements in all subsystems. The q…
The principle of maximum likelihood reconstruction has proven to yield satisfactory results in the context of quantum state tomography for many-body systems of moderate system sizes. Until recently, however, quantum state tomography has been considered to be infeasible for systems consisting of a large number of subsystems due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space dimension with the number of constituents. Several reconstruction schemes have been proposed since then to overcome the two main obstacles in quantum many-body tomography: experiment time and postprocessing resources. Here w…
We introduce a novel concept which we call as potent value of system observable for pre- and post-selected quantum states. This describes, in general, how a quantum system affects the state of the apparatus during the time between two strong measurements corresponding to pre- and post-selections. The potent value can be realized for any interaction strength and for arbitrary coupling between the system and the apparatus observables. Most importantly, potent values generalize and unify the notion of the weak values and modular values of observables in quantum theory. Furthermore, we define a po…
We consider the task of performing quantum state tomography on a $d$-level spin qudit, using only measurements of spin projection onto different quantization axes. After introducing a basis of operators closely related to the spherical harmonics, which obey the rotational symmetries of spin qudits, we map our quantum tomography task onto the classical problem of signal recovery on the sphere. We then provide algorithms with $O(rd^3)$ serial runtime, parallelizable down to $O(rd^2)$, for (i) computing a priori upper bounds on the expected error with which spin projection measurements along $r$ …
We show the utility of the weak value amplification to observe the quantum interference between two close lying atomic coherent states in a post-selected atomic cat state, produced in a system of $N$ identical two-level atoms weakly interacting with a single photon field. Through the observation of the negative parts of the Wigner distribution of the post-selected atomic cat state, we find that the post-selected atomic cat state becomes more nonclassical when the post-selected polarization state of the single photon field tends toward becoming orthogonal to its pre-selected state. We show that…
Harnessing Post-selected von Neumann Measurements to Strengthen Entanglement and Quantum Signatures in Coherent States
Research and Development Center for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors（宽禁带半导体研发中心）；State Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Physics and Chip Technologies, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院半导体研究所半导体物理与芯片技术国家重点实验室）；Center of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学材料科学与光电/激光技术中心）
Recent work has revealed that the wave function of a pure state can be measured directly and that complementary knowledge of a quantum system can be obtained simultaneously by weak measurements. However, the original scheme applies only to pure states, and it is not efficient because most of the data are discarded by post-selection. Here, we propose tomography schemes for pure states and for mixed states via weak measurements, and our schemes are more efficient because we do not discard any data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that any matrix element of a general state can be directly read from a…
In arXiv:1107.4675 Ralph uses our post-selection model of closed timelike curves (P-CTC) to construct an "unproven-theorem" paradox, and claims that this voids our argument that P-CTCs are able to resolve such types of paradoxes. Here we point out that Ralph has not accounted for all the interactions needed for his construction. A more careful analysis confirms that indeed there is no paradox, contrary to his claims.
Reconstructing the full quantum state of a many-body system requires the estimation of a number of parameters that grows exponentially with system size. Nevertheless, there are situations in which one is only interested in a subset of these parameters and a full reconstruction is not needed. A paradigmatic example is a scenario where one aims at determining all the reduced states only up to a given size. Overlapping tomography provides constructions to address this problem with a number of product measurements much smaller than what is obtained when performing independent tomography of each re…
Quantum state tomography is the experimental procedure of determining an unknown state. It is not only essential for the verification of resources and processors of quantum information but is also important in its own right with regard to the foundation of quantum mechanics. Standard methods have been elusive for large systems because of the enormous number of observables to be measured and the exponential complexity of data post-processing. Here, we propose a new scheme of quantum state tomography that requires the measurement of only three observables (acting jointly on the system and pointe…
Weak values are the fundamental values for observables in a pre- and post-selected system. Weak values are typically measured by weak measurement, in which weak values appear in the change of not the pre- and post-selected system but the probe system. This indirect characteristic of weak measurement obscures the meaning of weak values for the pre- and post-selected system, in contrast to conventional physical quantities, which have a clear operational meaning. In this study, we operationally formulate weak values as the sensitivity of post-selection probability amplitude to small transformatio…
The ability to post-select the outcomes of an experiment is a useful theoretical concept and experimental tool. In the context of weak measurements post-selection can lead to surprising results such as complex weak values outside the range of eigenvalues. Usually post-selection is realized by a projective measurement, which is hard to implement in ensemble systems such as NMR. We demonstrate the first experiment of a weak measurement with post-selection on an NMR quantum information processor. Our setup is used for measuring complex weak values and weak values outside the range of eigenvalues.…
Tomography of the two qubit density matrix shared by Alice and Bob is an essential ingredient for guaranteeing an acceptable margin of confidentiality during the establishment of a secure fresh key through the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) scheme. We show how the Singapore protocol for key distribution is optimal from this point of view, due to the fact that it is based on so called SIC POVM qubit tomography which allows the most accurate full tomographic reconstruction of an unknown density matrix on the basis of a restricted set of experimental data. We illustrate with the help of experimen…
In the light of the progress in quantum technologies, the task of verifying the correct functioning of processes and obtaining accurate tomographic information about quantum states becomes increasingly important. Compressed sensing, a machinery derived from the theory of signal processing, has emerged as a feasible tool to perform robust and significantly more resource-economical quantum state tomography for intermediate-sized quantum systems. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of compressed sensing tomography in the regime in which tomographically complete data is available wit…
In this work we have explored few tools in Quantum State Tomography for Continuous Variable Systems. The concept of quantum states in phase space representation is introduced in a simple manner by using a few statistical concepts. Unlike most texts of Quantum information in which the Wigner function for a single mode is often more used, in this text the multi-modes state Wigner function is also approached. Our numerical investigations indicate that the reconstructed method using back-projection add some error due the choice of cutoff frequency, therefore it is necessary to use data post-proces…
Reshaping nonclassical properties and metrological performance of entangled coherent states via post-selected von Neumann measurements
State Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Physics and Chip Technologies, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院半导体研究所）；Center of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学材料科学与光电技术研究中心）；Wolfram Research South America（Wolfram Research 南美分部）；School of Physics, Liaoning University（辽宁大学物理学院）
This paper discusses the quantum mechanics of closed timelike curves (CTC) and of other potential methods for time travel. We analyze a specific proposal for such quantum time travel, the quantum description of CTCs based on post-selected teleportation (P-CTCs). We compare the theory of P-CTCs to previously proposed quantum theories of time travel: the theory is physically inequivalent to Deutsch's theory of CTCs, but it is consistent with path-integral approaches (which are the best suited for analyzing quantum field theory in curved spacetime). We derive the dynamical equations that a chrono…
All the $n(2n+3)$ mean and covariance parameters of an $n$-mode Gaussian states are expressed in terms of the expectation values of the same number of conjugates of the total number observable. This permits a complete tomography of the state. The same is applied to outputs of a Gaussian channel corresponding to selected coherent states to perform the complete tomography of the channel. This leads to some interesting problems concerning the distribution of the number operator and also tomographic complexity.
We study classical query algorithms with post-selection, and find that they are closely connected to rational functions with nonnegative coefficients. We show that the post-selected classical query complexity of a Boolean function is equal to the minimal degree of a rational function with nonnegative coefficients that approximates it (up to a factor of two). For post-selected quantum query algorithms, a similar relationship was shown by Mahadev and de Wolf, where the rational approximations are allowed to have negative coefficients. Using our characterisation, we find an exponentially large se…
Many seemingly paradoxical effects are known in the predictions for outcomes of intermediate measurements made on pre- and post-selected quantum systems. Despite appearances, these effects do not demonstrate the impossibility of a noncontextual hidden variable theory, since an explanation in terms of measurement-disturbance is possible. Nonetheless, we show that for every paradoxical effect wherein all the pre- and post- selected probabilities are 0 or 1 and the pre- and post-selected states are nonorthogonal, there is an associated proof of contextuality. This proof is obtained by considering…
