We introduce a new method to estimate unknown pure $d$-dimensional quantum states using the probability distributions associated with only three measurement bases. Measurement results of $2d$ projectors are employed to generate a set of $2^{d-1}$ possible states, the likelihood of which is evaluated using the measurement results of the $d$ remaining projectors. The state with the highest likelihood is the estimate of the unknown state. The method estimates all pure states but a null-measure set. The viability of the protocol is experimentally demonstrated using two different and complementary high-dimensional quantum information platforms. First, by exploring the photonic path-encoding strategy, we validate the method on a single 8-dimensional quantum system. Then, we resort to the five superconducting qubit IBM quantum processor to demonstrate the high performance of the method in the multipartite scenario.
We investigate the optimal estimation of quantum expectation value of a physical observable, which minimizes a mean error with respect to general measure of deviation, when a finite number of copies of a pure state are prepared. If pure sates are uniformly distributed, the minimum value of mean error for any measure of deviation is achieved by projective measurement on each copy.
The optimization of measurement for n samples of pure sates are studied. The error of the optimal measurement for n samples is asymptotically compared with the one of the maximum likelihood estimators from n data given by the optimal measurement for one sample.
A connection between the state estimation problem and the separability problem is noticed and exploited to find efficient numerical algorithms to solve the first one. Based on these ideas, we also derive a systematic method to obtain upper bounds on the maximum local fidelity when the states are distributed among several distant parties.
We present optimal measuring strategies for the estimation of the entanglement of unknown two-qubit pure states and of the degree of mixing of unknown single-qubit mixed states, of which N identical copies are available. The most general measuring strategies are considered in both situations, to conclude in the first case that a local, although collective, measurement suffices to estimate entanglement, a non-local property, optimally.
Suppose, we are given two finite ensembles of pure qubit states, so that the qubits in each ensemble are prepared in identical (but unknown for us) states lying on the equator of the Bloch sphere. What is the best strategy to estimate fidelity between these two finite ensembles of qubit states? We discuss three possible strategies for the fidelity estimation. We show that the best strategy includes two stages: a specific unitary transformation on two ensembles and state estimation of the output states of this transformation.
We study the optimal way to estimate the quantum expectation value of a physical observable when a finite number of copies of a quantum pure state are presented. The optimal estimation is determined by minimizing the squared error averaged over all pure states distributed in a unitary invariant way. We find that the optimal estimation is "biased", though the optimal measurement is given by successive projective measurements of the observable. The optimal estimate is not the sample average of observed data, but the arithmetic average of observed and "default nonobserved" data, with the latter c…
We calculate the Holevo Cramér-Rao bound for estimation of the displacement experienced by one mode of an two-mode squeezed vacuum state with squeezing r and find that it is equal to 4exp(-2r). This equals the sum of the mean squared error obtained from a dual homodyne measurement, indicating that the bound is tight and that the dual homodyne measurement is optimal.
We analyze the estimation of a qubit pure state by means of local measurements on $N$ identical copies and compare its averaged fidelity for an isotropic prior probability distribution to the absolute upper bound given by collective measurements. We discuss two situations: the first one, where the state is restricted to lie on the equator of the Bloch sphere, is formally equivalent to phase estimation; the second one, where there is no constrain on the state, can also be regarded as the estimation of a direction in space using a quantum arrow made out of $N$ parallel spins. We discuss various …
We introduce an inductive $n$-qubit pure-state estimation method. This is based on projective measurements on states of $2n+1$ separable bases or $2$ entangled bases plus the computational basis. Thus, the total number of measurement bases scales as $O(n)$ and $O(1)$, respectively. Thereby, the proposed method exhibits a very favorable scaling in the number of qubits when compared to other estimation methods. Monte Carlo numerical experiments show that the method can achieve a high estimation fidelity. For instance, an average fidelity of $0.88$ on the Hilbert space of $10$ qubits is achieved …
In any realistic quantum metrology scenarios, the ultimate precision in the estimation of parameters is limited not only by the so-called Heisenberg scaling, but also the environmental noise encountered by the underlying system. In the context of quantum estimation theory, it is of great significance to carefully evaluate the impact of a specific type of noise on the corresponding quantum Fisher information (QFI) or quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM). Here we investigate the multiple phase estimation problem for a natural parametrization of arbitrary pure states under white noise. We obt…
A direct derivation is given for the optimal mean fidelity of quantum state estimation of a d-dimensional unknown pure state with its N copies given as input, which was first obtained by M. Hayashi in terms of an infinite set of covariant positive operator valued measures (POVM's) and by Bruss and Macchiavello establishing a connection to optimal quantum cloning. An explicit condition for POVM measurement operators for optimal estimators is obtained, by which we construct optimal estimators with finite POVM using exact quadratures on a hypersphere. These finite optimal estimators are not gener…
We identify optimal measurement strategies for phase estimation in different scenarios. For pure states of a single qubit, we show that optimal measurements form a broad set parametrized with a continuous variable. When the state is mixed this set reduces to merely two possible measurements. For two qubits, we focus on the symmetric Werner state. We find an optimal measurement and show that estimation from the population imbalance is optimal only if the state is pure. Finally, for a pure state of $N$ qubits, we finds under which conditions the estimation from the full $N$-body correlation and …
Quantum tomography has become a key tool for the assessment of quantum states, processes, and devices. This drives the search for tomographic methods that achieve greater accuracy. In the case of mixed states of a single 2-dimensional quantum system adaptive methods have been recently introduced that achieve the theoretical accuracy limit deduced by Hayashi and Gill and Massar. However, accurate estimation of higher-dimensional quantum states remains poorly understood. This is mainly due to the existence of incompatible observables, which makes multiparameter estimation difficult. Here we pres…
In this article we propose a method to estimate with high accuracy pure quantum states of a single qudit. Our method is based on the minimization of the squared error between the complex probability amplitudes of the unknown state and its estimate. We show by means of numerical experiments that the estimation accuracy of the present method, which is given by the expectation of the squared error on the sample space of estimates, is state independent. Furthermore, the estimation accuracy delivered by our method is close to twice the Gill-Massar lower bound, which represents the best achievable a…
Near-optimal pure state estimation with adaptive Fisher-symmetric measurements
Instituto Milenio de Investigación en Óptica, Universidad de Concepción（孔塞普西翁大学米利尼奥光学研究所）；Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas, Departamento de Física, Universidad de Concepción（孔塞普西翁大学物理与数学科学学院物理系）；ICFO - Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（巴塞罗那科学技术研究所光子科学研究所）
We study the geometric measure of entanglement (GM) of pure symmetric states related to rank-one positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs) and establish a general connection with quantum state estimation theory, especially the maximum likelihood principle. Based on this connection, we provide a method for computing the GM of these states and demonstrate its additivity property under certain conditions. In particular, we prove the additivity of the GM of pure symmetric multiqubit states whose Majorana points under Majorana representation are distributed within a half sphere, including all pure …
We give a new geometric interpretation of quantum pure states. Using Voronoi diagrams, we reinterpret the structure of the space of pure states as a subspace of the quantum state space. In addition to the known coincidence of some Voronoi diagrams for one-qubit pure states, we will show that even for mixed one-qubit states, as far as sites are given as pure states, the Voronoi diagram with respect to some distances -- the divergence, the Bures distance, and the Euclidean distance -- are all the same. As to higher level pure quantum states, for the divergence, the Fubini-Study distance, and the…
Decoherence is believed to deteriorate the ability of a purification scheme that is based on the idea of driving a system to a pure state by repeatedly measuring another system in interaction with the former and hinder for a pure state to be extracted asymptotically. Nevertheless, we find a way out of this difficulty by deriving an analytic expression of the reduced density matrix for a two-qubit system immersed in a bath. It is shown that we can still extract a pure state if the environment brings about only dephasing effects. In addition, for a dissipative environment, there is a possibility…
This post is the author's doctoral dissertation back in 1997. The dissertation covers following four kinds of problems: First, it studies achievable Cramer-Rao type bounds of various multi-parameter pure state models. Second, it relates CR-bouds, both of mixed state and pure states, with Berry-Uhlmann curvature. Roughly, it characterize how the statistical model differs from classical probability distribution family. Though the relation is rather qualitative for mixed states, the quantitative relation is obtained for pure state models. Third topic is relation between Berry-Uhlmann geometry and…
The accuracy of any physical scheme used to estimate the parameter describing the strength of a single qubit Pauli channel can be quantified using standard techniques from quantum estimation theory. It is known that the optimal estimation scheme, with m channel invocations, uses initial states for the systems which are pure and unentangled and provides an uncertainty of O[1/m^(1/2)]. This protocol is analogous to a classical repetition and averaging scheme. We consider estimation schemes where the initial states available are not pure and compare a protocol involving quantum correlated states …
We study the problem of quantum-state tomography under the assumption that the state of the system is close to pure. In this context, an efficient measurements that one typically formulates uniquely identify a pure state from within the set of other pure states. In general such measurements are not robust in the presence of measurement noise and other imperfections, and therefore are less practical for tomography. We argue here that state tomography experiments should instead be done using measurements that can distinguish a pure state from {\em any} other quantum state, of any rank. We show t…
We propose practical and efficient protocols for verifying bipartite pure states for any finite dimension, which can also be applied to fidelity estimation. Our protocols are based on adaptive local projective measurements with either one-way or two-way communications, which are very easy to implement in practice. They can extract the key information much more efficiently than known protocols based on tomography or direct fidelity estimation, and their efficiencies are comparable to the best protocols based on entangling measurements. These protocols highlight the significance of mutually unbi…
In the context of phase estimation with Gaussian states, we introduce a quantifiable definition of metrological advantage that takes into account thermal noise in the preparation procedure. For a broad set of states, \textit{isotropic non-pure Gaussian states}, we show that squeezing is not only necessary, but sufficient, to achieve metrological advantage. We interpret our results in the framework of resource theory, and discuss possible sources of advantage other than squeezing. Our work is a step towards using phase estimation with pure and mixed state to define and quantify nonclassicality.…
We investigate the ultimate precision limits for quantum phase estimation in terms of the coherence, $C$, of the probe. For pure states, we give the minimum estimation variance attainable, $V(C)$, and the optimal state, in the asymptotic limit when the probe system size, $n$, is large. We prove that pure states are optimal only if $C$ scales as $n$ with a sufficiently large proportionality factor, and that the rank of the optimal state increases with decreasing $C$, eventually becoming full-rank. We show that the variance exhibits a Heisenberg-like scaling, $V(C) \sim a_n/C^2$, where $a_n$ dec…
We derive several expressions for the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) for the multi-parameter estimation of multi-mode Gaussian quantum states, the corresponding symmetric logarithmic derivatives, and conditions for saturability of the quantum Cramér-Rao bound. This bound determines the ultimate precision with which parameters encoded into quantum states can be estimated. We include expressions for mixed states, for the case when the Williamson decomposition of the covariance matrix is known, expressions in terms of infinite series, and expressions for pure states. We also discuss pro…
Practical implementations of quantum information-theoretic applications rely on phase coherences between systems. These coherences are disturbed by misalignment between phase references. Quantum states carrying phase-asymmetry act as resources to counteract this misalignment. In this paper, we construct protocols for interconverting these resources by first estimating the misalignment. Our method achieves sublinear, but otherwise arbitrarily high, asymptotic rate of conversion of pure resource states to mixed ones. No other method is known for asymptotic pure-to-mixed state conversion. Our met…
The major problem of multiparameter quantum estimation theory is to find an ultimate measurement scheme to go beyond the standard quantum limits that each quasi-classical estimation measurement is limited by. Although, in some specifics quantum protocols without environmental noise, the ultimate sensitivity of a multiparameter quantum estimation can beat the standard quantum limit. However, the presence of noise imposes limitations on the enhancement of precision due to the inevitable existence of environmental fluctuations. Here, we address the motivation behind the usage of Gaussian quantum …
We derive a lower bound for the optimal fidelity for deterministic cloning a set of n pure states. In connection with states estimation, we obtain a lower bound about average maximum correct states estimation probability.
In the paper the Bayesian and the least squares methods of quantum state tomography are compared for a single qubit. The quality of the estimates are compared by computer simulation when the true state is either mixed or pure. The fidelity and the Hilbert-Schmidt distance are used to quantify the error. It was found that in the regime of low measurement number the Bayesian method outperforms the least squares estimation. Both methods are quite sensitive to the degree of mixedness of the state to be estimated, that is, their performance can be quite bad near pure states.
We establish a connection between optimal quantum cloning and optimal state estimation for d-dimensional quantum systems. In this way we derive an upper limit on the fidelity of state estimation for d-dimensional pure quantum states and, furthermore, for generalized inputs supported on the symmetric subspace.
We formulate, with full generality, the asymptotic estimation theory for Gaussian states in terms of their first and second moments. By expressing the quantum Fisher information (QFI) and the elusive symmetric logarithmic derivative (SLD) in terms of the state's moments (and their derivatives) we are able to obtain the noncommutative extension of the well known expression for the Fisher information of a Gaussian probability distribution. Focusing on models with fixed first moments and identical Williamson 'diagonal' states --which include pure state models--, we obtain their SLD and QFI, and e…
We describe an optimized, self-correcting procedure for the Bayesian inference of pure quantum states. By analyzing the history of measurement outcomes at each step, the procedure returns the most likely pure state, as well as the optimal basis for the measurement that is to follow. The latter is chosen to maximize, on average, the fidelity of the most likely state after the measurement. We also consider a practical variant of this protocol, where the available measurement bases are restricted to certain limited sets of bases. We demonstrate the success of our method by considering in detail t…
The dynamics of Fisher information for an accelerated system initially prepared in the $X$-state is discussed. An analytical solution, which consists of three parts: classical, the average over all pure states and a mixture of pure states is derived for the general state and for Werner state. It is shown that, the Unruh acceleration has a depleting effect on the Fisher information. This depletion depends on the degree of entanglement of the initial state settings. For the $X$-state, for some intervals of Unruh acceleration, the Fisher information remains constant, irrespective to the Unruh acc…
We consider the problem of estimating the state of a large but finite number $N$ of identical quantum systems. In the limit of large $N$ the problem simplifies. In particular the only relevant measure of the quality of the estimation is the mean quadratic error matrix. Here we present a bound on the mean quadratic error which is a new quantum version of the Cramér-Rao inequality. This new bound expresses in a succinct way how in the quantum case one can trade information about one parameter for information about another parameter. The bound holds for arbitrary measurements on pure states, but …
A way to characterize quantum nonlocality is to see difference in the figure of merit between LOCC optimal protocol and globally optimal protocol in doing certain task, e.g., state estimation, state discrimination, cloning and broadcasting. Especially, we focus on the case where $n$ tensor of unknown states. Our conclusion is that separable pure states are more non-local than entangled pure states. More specifically, the difference in the figure of the merit is exponentially small if the state is entangled, and the exponent is log of the largest Schmidt coefficient. On the other hand, in many …
Gisin and Popescu [PRL, 83, 432 (1999)] have shown that more information about their direction can be obtained from a pair of anti-parallel spins compared to a pair of parallel spins, where the first member of the pair (which we call the pointer member) can point equally along any direction in the Bloch sphere. They argued that this was due to the difference in dimensionality spanned by these two alphabets of states. Here we consider similar alphabets, but with the first spin restricted to a fixed small circle of the Bloch sphere. In this case, the dimensionality spanned by the anti-parallel v…
We consider quantum enhanced measurements with initially mixed states. We show very generally that for any linear propagation of the initial state that depends smoothly on the parameter to be estimated, the sensitivity is bound by the maximal sensitivity that can be achieved for any of the pure states from which the initial density matrix is mixed. This provides a very general proof that purely classical correlations cannot improve the sensitivity of parameter estimation schemes in quantum enhanced measurement schemes.
Quantum state tomography (QST) for reconstructing pure states requires exponentially increasing resources and measurements with the number of qubits by using state-of-the-art quantum compressive sensing (CS) methods. In this article, QST reconstruction for any pure state composed of the superposition of $K$ different computational basis states of $n$ qubits in a specific measurement set-up, i.e., denoted as $K$-sparse, is achieved without any initial knowledge and with quantum polynomial-time complexity of resources based on the assumption of the existence of polynomial size quantum circuits f…
Analysis of Superradiance-Based Quantum Metrology under Independent Markovian Pure Dephasing
School of Fundamental Science and Technology, Keio University（庆应义塾大学基础理工学部）；Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Communication Engineering, Faculty of Advanced Science and Engineering, Chuo University（中央大学理工学府电气电子通信工程系）；Department of Physics, Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学物理系）；Center for Spintronics Research Network, Keio University（庆应义塾大学自旋电子学研究网络中心）
Quantum probing is the art of exploiting simple quantum systems interacting with a complex environment to extract precise information about some environmental parameters, e.g. the temperature of the environment or its spectral density. Here we analyze the performance of a single-qubit probe in characterizing Ohmic bosonic environments at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we analyze the effects of tuning the interaction Hamiltonian between the probe and the environment, going beyond the traditional paradigm of pure dephasing. In the weak-coupling and short-time regime, we address the dynamics…
It is shown that the condition for achieving the quantum Cramer-Rao bound of phase estimation in conventional two-path interferometers is that the state is symmetric with regard to an (unphysical) exchange of the two paths. Since path symmetry is conserved under phase shifts, the maximal phase sensitivity can be achieved at arbitrary bias phases, indicating that path symmetric states can achieve their quantum Cramer-Rao bound in Bayesian estimates of a completely unknown phase.
We present a complete methodology for testing the performances of quantum tomography protocols. The theory is validated by several numerical examples and by the comparison with experimental results achieved with various protocols for whole families of polarization states of qubits and ququaters including pure, mixed, entangled and separable.
We analyse the reconstruction of an unknown pure qubit state. We derive the optimal guess that can be inferred from any set of measurements on N identical copies of the system with the fidelity as a figure of merit. We study in detail the estimation process with individual von Neumann measurements and demonstrate that they are very competitive as compared to (complicated) collective measurements. We compute the expressions of the fidelity for large $N$ and show that individual measurement schemes can perform optimally in the asymptotic regime.
The estimation of the density matrix of a $k$-level quantum system is studied when the parametrization is given by the real and imaginary part of the entries and they are estimated by independent measurements. It is established that the properties of the estimation procedure depend very much on the invertibility of the true state. In particular, in case of a pure state the estimation is less efficient. Moreover, several estimation schemes are compared for the unknown state of a qubit when one copy is measured at a time. It is shown that the average mean quadratic error matrix is the smallest i…
Entanglement concentration from many copies of unknown pure states is discussed, and we propose the protocol which not only achieves entropy rate, but also produces the perfect maximally entangled state. Our protocol is induced naturally from symmetry of $n$-tensored pure state, and is optimal for all the protocols which concentrates entanglement from unknown pure states, in the sense of failure probability. In the proof of optimality, the statistical estimation theory plays a key role, for concentrated entanglement gives a natural estimate of the entropy of entanglement.
This paper proposes and analyzes a new method for quantum state estimation, called hedged maximum likelihood (HMLE). HMLE is a quantum version of Lidstone's Law, also known as the "add beta" rule. A straightforward modification of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), it can be used as a plugin replacement for MLE. The HMLE estimate is a strictly positive density matrix, slightly less likely than the ML estimate, but with much better behavior for predictive tasks. Single-qubit numerics indicate that HMLE beats MLE, according to several metrics, for nearly all "true" states. For nearly-pure stat…
Quantum estimation involving multiple parameters remains an important problem of both theoretical and practical interest. In this work, we study the problem of simultaneous estimation of two parameters that are respectively associate with the length and direction of the Bloch vector for identically prepared qubit states that is confined to a plane, where in order to obtain the optimal estimation precision for both parameters, collective measurements on multiple qubits are necessary. Upon treating $N$ qubits as an ensemble of spin-1/2 systems, we show that simultaneous optimal estimation for bo…
Given a pure state vector |x> and a density matrix rho, the function p(x|rho)=<x|rho|x> defines a probability density on the space of pure states parameterised by density matrices. The associated Fisher-Rao information measure is used to define a unitary invariant Riemannian metric on the space of density matrices. An alternative derivation of the metric, based on square-root density matrices and trace norms, is provided. This is applied to the problem of quantum-state estimation. In the simplest case of unitary parameter estimation, new higher-order corrections to the uncertainty relations, a…
We study quantum tomography based on a stochastic continuous-time measurement record obtained from a probe field collectively interacting with an ensemble of identically prepared systems. In comparison to previous studies, we consider here the case in which the measurement-induced backaction has a nonnegligible effect on the dynamical evolution of the ensemble. We formulate a maximum likelihood estimate for the initial quantum state given only a single instance of the continuous diffusive measurement record. We apply our estimator to the simplest problem -- state tomography of a single pure qu…
We present a classical Monte Carlo (MC) scheme which efficiently estimates an imaginary-time, decaying signal for stoquastic (i.e. sign-problem-free) local Hamiltonians. The decay rates in this signal correspond to Hamiltonian eigenvalues (with associated eigenstates present in an input state) and can be classically extracted using a classical signal processing method like ESPRIT. We compare the efficiency of this MC scheme to its quantum counterpart in which one extracts eigenvalues of a general local Hamiltonian from a real-time, oscillatory signal obtained through quantum phase estimation c…
