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 present an adaptive tomographic method and show through numerical simulations that, after a few iterations, it is asymptotically approaching the fundamental Gill-Massar lower bound for the estimation accuracy of pure quantum states in high dimension. The method is based on a combination of stochastic optimization on the field of the complex numbers and statistical inference, exceeds the accuracy of any mixed-state tomographic method, and can be demonstrated with current experimental capabilities. The proposed method may lead to new developments in quantum metrology.
The statistical distance between pure quantum states is obtained by finding a measurement that is optimal in a sense defined by Wootters. As such, one may expect that the statistical distance will turn out to be different if the set of possible measurements is restricted in some way. It nonetheless turns out that if the restriction is to local operations and classical communication (LOCC) on any multipartite system, then the statistical distance is the same as it is without restriction, being equal to the angle between the states in Hilbert space.
The Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem (PBR) claims to rule out the possibility of a purely statistical interpretation of the quantum state under an assumption of how to represent independent operations in any hidden variable model. We show that PBR's assumption of independence encodes an assumption of local causality, which is already known to conflict with the predictions of quantum theory via Bell-type inequalities. We devise a weaker formulation of independence within a general hidden variable model that is empirically indistinguishable from the PBR assumption in situations where certain hidden…
Chapter 3 of S. Lloyd's 1988 Ph.D. thesis, `Black Holes, Demons, and the Loss of Coherence: How complex systems get information and what they do with it,' supervisor Heinz Pagels. Reformulates statistical mechanics in terms of pure states and shows that (a) quantum statistics of typical pure states are very close to the mechanics of statistical mechanical ensembles; (b) if a system is in a typical state with energy E, then the reduced density matrix of a subsystem is very close to a thermal state. (A similar result was derived using Levy's lemma some years later by S. Popescu, A.J. Short, A.Wi…
The success of quantum information processing applications relies on accurate and efficient characterization of quantum states, especially nearly-pure states. In this work, we investigate a procedure for adaptive qubit state tomography which achieves $O(1/N)$ scaling in accuracy for large $N$. We analyze the performance of the adaptive protocol on the characterization of pure, mixed and nearly-pure states, and clarify the interplay between the purity of the state and the statistical fluctuations of the measurement results. Our results highlight the subtle difference between the characterizatio…
In this paper, inspired by the "Minimum Description Length Principle" in classical Statistics, we introduce a new method for predicting the outcomes of a quantum measurement and for estimating the state of a quantum system with minimum quantum complexity, while, at the same time, avoiding overfitting.
We argue from the point of view of statistical inference that the quantum relative entropy is a good measure for distinguishing between two quantum states (or two classes of quantum states) described by density matrices. We extend this notion to describe the amount of entanglement between two quantum systems from a statistical point of view. Our measure is independent of the number of entangled systems and their dimensionality.
Statistical estimation and test of unknown channels have attracted interest of many researchers. In optimizing the process of inference, an important step is optimization of the input state, which in general do depend on the kind of inference (estimation or test, etc.), on the error measure, and so on. But sometimes, there is a universally optimal input state, or an input state best for all the statistical inferences and for all the risk functions. In the paper, the existence of a universally optimal state is shown for group covariant/contravariant channels, unital qubit channels and some meas…
In this thesis, I present several results on quantum statistical inference in the following two directions. Firstly, I demonstrate that quantum algorithms can be applied to enhance the computing and training of Gaussian processes (GPs), a powerful model widely used in classical statistical inference and supervised machine learning. A crucial component of the quantum GP algorithm is solving linear systems with quantum computers, for which I present a novel algorithm that achieves a provable advantage over previously known methods. I will also explicitly address the task of encoding the classica…
We consider the statistical properties of photon detection with imperfect detectors that exhibit dark counts and less than unit efficiency, in the context of tomographic reconstruction. In this context, the detectors are used to implement certain POVMs that would allow to reconstruct the quantum state or quantum process under consideration. Here we look at the intermediate step of inferring outcome probabilities from measured outcome frequencies, and show how this inference can be performed in a statistically sound way in the presence of detector imperfections. Merging outcome probabilities fo…
We study quantum statistical inference tasks of hypothesis testing and their canonical variations, in order to review relations between their corresponding figures of merit---measures of statistical distance---and demonstrate the crucial differences which arise in the quantum regime in contrast to the classical setting. In our analysis, we primarily focus on the geometric approach to data inference problems, within which the aforementioned measures can be neatly interpreted as particular forms of divergences that quantify distances in the space of probability distributions or, when dealing wit…
Many processes in nature seem to be entirely controlled by transition rates and the corresponding statistical dynamics. Some of them are in essence quantum, like the decay of excited states, the tunneling through barriers or the decay of unstable nuclei. Thus, starting from first principles, those systems should be analyzed on the basis of the Schroedinger equation. In the present paper we consider a two level system coupled to an environment which is basically described by an two-band energy scheme. For appropriately tuned environment parameters, the excitation probability of the two level sy…
We formulate statistical mechanics based on a pure quantum state, which we call a ``thermal pure quantum (TPQ) state''. A single TPQ state gives not only equilibrium values of mechanical variables, such as magnetization and correlation functions, but also those of genuine thermodynamic variables and thermodynamic functions, such as entropy and free energy. Among many possible TPQ states, we discuss the canonical TPQ state, the TPQ state whose temperature is specified. % We also propose there are other TPQ states. In the TPQ formulation of statistical mechanics, thermal fluctuations are complet…
Expanding a remark of my PHD-thesis the noncommutative bayesian statistical inference from one wedge of a bifurcate Killing horizon is analyzed looking at its inter-relation with the Unruh effect
The response of a quantum system in a pure state to an external force is investigated by reconsidering the standard statistical approach to quantum dynamics on the light of the statistical description of equilibrium based on typicality. We prove that the response of the large majority of quantum pure states subjected to the same arbitrary external perturbation tends to be close to the statistical response as the dimension of the Hilbert space increases. This is what we can term dynamical typicality. The theoretical analysis is substantiated by numerical simulations of the response of a spin sy…
A thermal equilibrium state of a quantum many-body system can be represented by a typical pure state, which we call a thermal pure quantum (TPQ) state. We construct the canonical TPQ state, which corresponds to the canonical ensemble of the conventional statistical mechanics. Only a single realization of the TPQ state gives all variables of statistical-mechanical interest. We show that TPQ states corresponding to different ensembles give identical thermodynamic results, and they are related by simple analytic transformations. We have thus completed the TPQ formulation of statistical mechanics.…
We comment on a formulation of quantum statistical mechanics, which incorporates the statistical inference of Shannon. Our basic idea is to distinguish the dynamical entropy of von Neumann, $H = -k Tr \hatρ\ln\hatρ$, in terms of the density matrix $\hatρ(t)$, and the statistical amount of uncertainty of Shannon, $S= -k \sum_{n}p_{n}\ln p_{n}$, with $p_{n}=< n|\hatρ|n>$ in the representation where the total energy and particle numbers are diagonal. These quantities satisfy the inequality $S\geq H$. We propose to interprete Shannon's statistical inference as specifying the {\em initial condition…
Interest in problems of statistical inference connected to measurements of quantum systems has recently increased substantially, in step with dramatic new developments in experimental techniques for studying small quantum systems. Furthermore, theoretical developments in the theory of quantum measurements have brought the basic mathematical framework for the probability calculations much closer to that of classical probability theory. The present paper reviews this field and proposes and interrelates a number of new concepts for an extension of classical statistical inference to the quantum co…
Many experiments can be interpreted in terms of random processes operating according to some internal protocols. When experiments are costly or cannot be repeated only one or a few finite samples are available. In this paper we study data generated by pseudo-random computer experiments operating according to particular internal protocols. We show that the standard statistical analysis performed on a sample, containing 100000 data points or more, may sometimes be highly misleading and statistical errors largely underestimated. Our results confirm in a dramatic way the dangers of standard asympt…
We define the statistical quadrature evolution (QE) method for multicarrier continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD). A multicarrier CVQKD protocol uses Gaussian subcarrier quantum continuous variables (CVs) for information transmission. The QE scheme utilizes the theory of mathematical statistics and statistical information processing. The QE model is based on the Gaussian quadrature inference (GQI) framework to provide a minimal error estimate of the CV state quadratures. The QE block evaluates a unique and stable estimation of the non-observable continuous input from the measure…
