It is well-known in classical frame theory that overcomplete representations of a given vector space provide robustness to additive noise on the frame coefficients of an unknown vector. We describe how the same robustness can be shown to exist in the context of quantum state estimation. A key element of the discussion is the application of classical frame theory to operator-valued vector spaces, or operator spaces, which arise naturally in quantum mechanics. Specifically, in the problem we describe the frame vectors are represented by the elements of an informationally complete or overcomplete (IC or IOC) POVM, the frame coefficients are represented by the outcome probabilities of a quantum measurement made on an unknown state, and the error on the frame coefficients arises from finite sample size estimations of the probabilities. We show that with this formulation of the problem, there is a tradeoff in estimation performance between the number of copies of the unknown system and the number of POVM elements. Lastly, we present evidence through simulation that the same tradeoff is present in the context of quantum binary state detection -- the probability of error can be reduced either by increasing the number of copies of the unknown system or by increasing the number of POVM elements.
This short note reviews the notion and fundamental properties of SIC-POVM and its connection with the length of separable states. We also review the t-design.
We study informationally overcomplete measurements for quantum state estimation so as to clarify their tomographic significance as compared with minimal informationally complete measurements. We show that informationally overcomplete measurements can improve the tomographic efficiency significantly over minimal measurements when the states of interest have high purities. Nevertheless, the efficiency is still too limited to be satisfactory with respect to figures of merit based on monotone Riemannian metrics, such as the Bures metric and quantum Chernoff metric. In this way, we also pinpoint th…
There has been much interest in so-called SIC-POVMs: rank 1 symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures. In this paper we discuss the larger class of POVMs which are symmetric and informationally complete but not necessarily rank 1. This class of POVMs is of some independent interest. In particular it includes a POVM which is closely related to the discrete Wigner function. However, it is interesting mainly because of the light it casts on the problem of constructing rank 1 symmetric informationally complete POVMs. In this connection we derive an extremal condition alt…
Eigenstates of permutation gates are either stabilizer states (for gates in the Pauli group) or magic states, thus allowing universal quantum computation [M. Planat and Rukhsan-Ul-Haq, Preprint 1701.06443]. We show in this paper that a subset of such magic states, when acting on the generalized Pauli group, define (asymmetric) informationally complete POVMs. Such IC-POVMs, investigated in dimensions $2$ to $12$, exhibit simple finite geometries in their projector products and, for dimensions $4$ and $8$ and $9$, relate to two-qubit, three-qubit and two-qutrit contextuality.
We study entanglement witness and present a construction of entanglement witnesses in terms of the symmetric informationally complete measurements (SIC-POVM). The capability of our witness is shown by some examples and it can be found this witness detects more entanglement than previous separability method given also by SIC-POVM. What's more, comparing with the dimension dependence of SIC-POVM, we also give the entanglement witnesses can be always constructed from general symmetric informationally complete measurements (GSIC-POVM).
It has been shown that classes of (minimal asymmetric) informationally complete POVMs in dimension d can be built using the multiparticle Pauli group acting on appropriate fiducial states [M. Planat and Z. Gedik, R. Soc. open sci. 4, 170387 (2017)]. The latter states may also be derived starting from the Poincaré upper half-plane model H. For doing this, one translates the congruence (or non-congruence) subgroups of index d of the modular group into groups of permutation gates whose some of the eigenstates are the seeked fiducials. The structure of some IC-POVMs is found to be intimately relat…
We consider measurements, described by a positive-operator-valued measure (POVM), whose outcome probabilities determine an arbitrary pure state of a D-dimensional quantum system. We call such a measurement a pure-state informationally complete (PSI-complete) POVM. We show that a measurement with 2D-1 outcomes cannot be PSI-complete, and then we construct a POVM with 2D outcomes that suffices, thus showing that a minimal PSI-complete POVM has 2D outcomes. We also consider PSI-complete POVMs that have only rank-one POVM elements and construct an example with 3D-2 outcomes, which is a generalizat…
In the four-dimensional Hilbert space, there exist 16 Heisenberg--Weyl (HW) covariant symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC~POVMs) consisting of 256 fiducial states on a single orbit of the Clifford group. We explore the structure of these SIC~POVMs by studying the symmetry transformations within a given SIC~POVM and among different SIC~POVMs. Furthermore, we find 16 additional SIC~POVMs by a regrouping of the 256 fiducial states, and show that they are unitarily equivalent to the original 16 SIC~POVMs by establishing an explicit unitary transformation. We t…
A general symmetric-informationally-complete (GSIC)-positive-operator-valued measure (POVM) is known to provide an optimal quantum state tomography among minimal IC POVMs with a fixed average purity. In this paper we provide a general construction of a GSIC POVM by means of a complete orthogonal basis (COB), also interpreted as a normal quasiprobability representation. A spectral property of a COB is shown to play a key role in the construction of SIC POVMs and also for the bound of the mean-square error of the state tomography. In particular, a necessary and sufficient condition to construct …
We construct the set of all general (i.e. not necessarily rank 1) symmetric informationally complete (SIC) positive operator valued measures (POVMs). In particular, we show that any orthonormal basis of a real vector space of dimension d^2-1 corresponds to some general SIC POVM and vice versa. Our constructed set of all general SIC-POVMs contains weak SIC-POVMs for which each POVM element can be made arbitrarily close to a multiple times the identity. On the other hand, it remains open if for all finite dimensions our constructed family contains a rank 1 SIC-POVM.
We consider the existence in arbitrary finite dimensions d of a POVM comprised of d^2 rank-one operators all of whose operator inner products are equal. Such a set is called a ``symmetric, informationally complete'' POVM (SIC-POVM) and is equivalent to a set of d^2 equiangular lines in C^d. SIC-POVMs are relevant for quantum state tomography, quantum cryptography, and foundational issues in quantum mechanics. We construct SIC-POVMs in dimensions two, three, and four. We further conjecture that a particular kind of group-covariant SIC-POVM exists in arbitrary dimensions, providing numerical res…
The article establishes a framework for dynamic generation of informationally complete POVMs in quantum state tomography. Assuming that the evolution of a quantum system is given by a dynamical map in the Kraus representation, one can switch to the Heisenberg picture and define the measurements in the time domain. Consequently, starting with an incomplete set of positive operators, one can obtain sufficient information for quantum state reconstruction by multiple measurements. The framework has been demonstrated on qubits and qutrits. For some types of dynamical maps, it suffices to initially …
C. A. Fuchs and M. Sasaki defined the quantumness of a set of quantum states in \cite{Quantumness}, which is closely related to the fidelity loss in transmission of the quantum states through a classical channel. In \cite{Fuchs}, Fuchs showed that in $d$-dimensional Hilbert space, minimum quantumness is $\frac{2}{d+1}$, and this can be achieved by all rays in the space. He left an open problem, asking whether fewer than $d^2$ states can achieve this bound. Recently, in a different context, A. J. Scott introduced a concept of generalized $t$-design in \cite{GenSphet}, which is a natural general…
In the present work, we suggest an approach for describing dynamics of finite-dimensional quantum systems in terms of pseudostochastic maps acting on probability distributions, which are obtained via minimal informationally complete quantum measurements. The suggested method for probability representation of quantum dynamics preserves the tensor product structure, which makes it favourable for the analysis of multi-qubit systems. A key advantage of the suggested approach is that minimal informationally complete positive operator-valued measures (MIC-POVMs) are easier to construct in comparison…
We show that a special type of measurements, called symmetric informationally complete positive operator-valued measures (SIC POVMs), provide a stronger entanglement detection criterion than the computable cross-norm or realignment criterion based on local orthogonal observables. As an illustration, we demonstrate the enhanced entanglement detection power in simple systems of qubit and qutrit pairs. This observation highlights the significance of SIC POVMs for entanglement detection.
I construct a POVM which has 2d rank-one elements and which is informationally complete for generic pure states in d dimensions, thus confirming a conjecture made by Flammia, Silberfarb, and Caves (quant-ph/0404137). I show that if a rank-one POVM is required to be informationally complete for all pure states in d dimensions, it must have at least 3d-2 elements. I also show that, in a POVM which is informationally complete for all pure states in d dimensions, for any vector there must be at least 2d-1 POVM elements which do not annihilate that vector.
Minimal informationally complete positive operator-valued measures (MIC-POVMs) are special kinds of measurement in quantum theory in which the statistics of their $d^2$-outcomes are enough to reconstruct any $d$-dimensional quantum state. For this reason, MIC-POVMs are referred to as standard measurements for quantum information. Here, we report an experiment with entangled photon pairs that certifies, for what we believe is the first time, a MIC-POVM for qubits following a device-independent protocol (i.e., modeling the state preparation and the measurement devices as black boxes, and using o…
Recently introduced shadow tomography protocols use classical shadows of quantum states to predict many target functions of an unknown quantum state. Unlike full quantum state tomography, shadow tomography does not insist on accurate recovery of the density matrix for high rank mixed states. Yet, such a protocol makes multiple accurate predictions with high confidence, based on a moderate number of quantum measurements. One particular influential algorithm, proposed by Huang, Kueng, and Preskill arXiv:2002.08953, requires additional circuits for performing certain random unitary transformation…
It is crucial for various quantum information processing tasks that the state of a quantum system can be determined reliably and efficiently from general quantum measurements. One important class of measurements for this purpose is symmetric informationally complete positive operator-valued measurements (SIC-POVMs). SIC-POVMs have the advantage of providing an unbiased estimator for the quantum state with the minimal number of outcomes needed for full tomography. By virtue of Naimark's dilation theorem, any POVM can always be realized with a suitable coupling between the system and an auxiliar…
What is the minimal number of elements in a rank-1 positive-operator-valued measure (POVM) which can uniquely determine any pure state in $d$-dimensional Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}_d$? The known result is that the number is no less than $3d-2$. We show that this lower bound is not tight except for $d=2$ or 4. Then we give an upper bound of $4d-3$. For $d=2$, many rank-1 POVMs with four elements can determine any pure states in $\mathcal{H}_2$. For $d=3$, we show eight is the minimal number by construction. For $d=4$, the minimal number is in the set of $\{10,11,12,13\}$. We show that if this n…
Symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC-POVMs) are studied within the framework of the probability representation of quantum mechanics. A SIC-POVM is shown to be a special case of the probability representation. The problem of SIC-POVM existence is formulated in terms of symbols of operators associated with a star-product quantization scheme. We show that SIC-POVMs (if they do exist) must obey general rules of the star product, and, starting from this fact, we derive new relations on SIC-projectors. The case of qubits is considered in detail, in particular, th…
Examples of symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC-POVMs) have been constructed in every dimension less than or equal to 67. However, it remains an open question whether they exist in all finite dimensions. A SIC-POVM is usually thought of as a highly symmetric structure in quantum state space. However, its elements can equally well be regarded as a basis for the Lie algebra gl(d,C). In this paper we examine the resulting structure constants, which are calculated from the traces of the triple products of the SIC-POVM elements and which, it turns out, characte…
An unavoidable task in quantum information processing is how to obtain data about the state of an individual system by suitable measurements. Informationally complete measurements are relevant in quantum state tomography, quantum cryptography, quantum cloning, and other questions. Symmetric informationally complete measurements (SIC-POVMs) form an especially important class of such measurements. We formulate some novel properties and relations for general SIC-POVMs in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. For a given density matrix and any general SIC-POVM, the so-called index of coincidence of …
Symmetric informationally complete (SIC) POVMs are a class of quantum measurements which, in addition to being informationally complete, satisfy three conditions: 1) every POVM element is rank one, 2) the Hilbert-Schmidt inner product between any two distinct elements is constant, and 3) the trace of each element is constant. The third condition is often overlooked, since it may give the impression that it follows trivially from the second. We show that this condition cannot be removed, as it leads to two distinct values for the trace of an element of the POVM. This observation has led us to d…
The geometry of the Quantum State Space, described by Bloch vectors, is a very intricate one. A deeper understanding of this geometry could lead to the solution of some difficult problems in Quantum Foundations and Quantum Information such as the existence of SIC-POVMs and the cardinality of the maximal set of MUBs. In this paper we show that the geometry of quantum states can be described by the probability distributions that quantum states induce over the outcomes of symmetric POVMs not necessarily of arbitrary rank or informationally complete. We also describe the properties of these symmet…
Symmetric informationally complete positive operator-valued measurement (SIC-POVM) is one important class of quantum measurement which is crucial for various quantum information processing tasks. SIC-POVMs have the advantage of providing an unbiased estimator for quantum states with the minimal number of outcomes needed for full tomography. We present an experimental approach on a photonic quantum walk which can be used to implement SIC-POVMs on a single-qbubit. The projection measurements of single-photons' positions correspond to elements of SIC-POVM on the polarization of single-photons.
A unified approach to (symmetric informationally complete) positive operator valued measures and mutually unbiased bases is developed in this article. The approach is based on the use of operator equivalents expanded in the enveloping algebra of SU(2). Emphasis is put on similarities and differences between SIC-POVMs and MUBs.
Informationally complete measurements on a quantum system allow to estimate the expectation value of any arbitrary operator by just averaging functions of the experimental outcomes. We show that such kind of measurements can be achieved through positive-operator valued measures (POVM's) related to unitary irreducible representations of a group on the Hilbert space of the system. With the help of frame theory we provide a constructive way to evaluate the data-processing function for arbitrary operators.
We study possible realizations of generalized quantum measurements on measurement-assisted programmable quantum processors. We focus our attention on the realization of von Neumann measurements and informationally complete POVMs. It is known that two unitary transformations implementable by the same programmable processor require mutually {\it orthogonal} states. It turns out that the situation with von Neumann measurements is different. Specifically, in order to realize two such measurements one does not have to use orthogonal program states. On the other hand, the number of the implementable…
We study separability problem using general symmetric informationally complete measurements and propose separability criteria in $\mathbb{C}^{d_{1}}\otimes\mathbb{C}^{d_{2}}$ and $\mathbb{C}^{d_{1}}\otimes\mathbb{C}^{d_{2}}\cdots\otimes\mathbb{C}^{d_{n}}$. Our criteria just require less local measurements and provide experimental implementation in detecting entanglement of unknown quantum states.
It is a well-known fact that the optimal POVM for quantum state tomography is the symmetric, informationally complete, positive operator valued measure (SIC-POVM). We investigate the same problem only in the case when there are some a priori information about the state, specifically when some parameters are known. In this paper we mainly focus on solving a 3-dimensional optimization problem, which gives us a non-trivial example for the so-called conditional SIC- POVMs, a straightforward generalization of the concept of SIC-POVMs. We also present other special cases to show further applications…
Wigner functions provide a way to do quantum physics using quasiprobabilities, that is, "probability" distributions that can go negative. Informationally complete POVMs, a much younger subject than phase space formulations of quantum mechanics, are less familiar but provide wholly probabilistic representations of quantum theory. In this paper, we show that the Born Rule links these two classes of structure and discuss the art of interconverting between them. In particular, we demonstrate that the operator bases corresponding to minimal discrete Wigner functions (Wigner bases) are orthogonaliza…
We report an experimental implementation of a single-qubit generalised measurement scenario(POVM) based on a quantum walk model. The qubit is encoded in a single-photon polarisation. The photon performs a quantum walk on an array of optical elements, where the polarisation-dependent translation is performed via birefringent beam displacers and a change of the polarisation is implemented with the help of wave-plates. We implement: (i) Trine-POVM, i.e., the POVM elements uniformly distributed on an equatorial plane of the Bloch sphere; (ii) Symmetric-Informationally- Complete (SIC) POVM; and (ii…
In quantum mechanics the statistics of the outcomes of a measuring apparatus is described by a positive operator valued measure (POVM). A quantum channel transforms POVM's into POVM's, generally irreversibly, thus loosing some of the information retrieved from the measurement. This poses the problem of which POVM's are "undisturbed", namely they are not irreversibly connected to another POVM. We will call such POVM clean. In a sense, the clean POVM's would be "perfect", since they would not have any additional "extrinsical" noise. Quite unexpectedly, it turns out that such cleanness property i…
Detecting $k$-nonstretchability via a class of informationally complete symmetric measurements
Hebei GEO University（河北地质大学）；Intelligent Sensor Network Engineering Research Center of Hebei Province, Hebei GEO University（河北省智能传感网络工程研究中心）；Hengshui University（衡水学院）
Informationally complete (IC) positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) are generalized quantum measurements that offer advantages over the standard computational basis readout of qubits. For instance, IC-POVMs enable efficient extraction of operator expectation values, a crucial step in many quantum algorithms. POVM measurements are typically implemented by coupling one additional ancilla qubit to each logical qubit, thus imposing high demands on the device size and connectivity. Here, we show how to implement a general class of IC-POVMs without ancilla qubits. We exploit the higher-dimension…
Many prominent quantum computing algorithms with applications in fields such as chemistry and materials science require a large number of measurements, which represents an important roadblock for future real-world use cases. We introduce a novel approach to tackle this problem through an adaptive measurement scheme. We present an algorithm that optimizes informationally complete positive operator-valued measurements (POVMs) on the fly in order to minimize the statistical fluctuations in the estimation of relevant cost functions. We show its advantage by improving the efficiency of the variatio…
The problem of finding symmetric informationally complete POVMs (SIC-POVMs) has been solved numerically for all dimensions $d$ up to 67 (A.J. Scott and M. Grassl, {\it J. Math. Phys.} 51:042203, 2010), but a general proof of existence is still lacking. For each dimension, it was shown that it is possible to find a SIC-POVM which is generated from a fiducial state upon application of the operators of the Heisenberg-Weyl group. We draw on the numerically determined fiducial states to study their phase-space features, as displayed by the characteristic function and the Wigner, Bargmann and Husimi…
Mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) and symmetric informationally complete (SIC) positive operator-valued measurements (POVMs) are two related topics in quantum information theory. They are generalized to mutually unbiased measurements (MUMs) and general symmetric informationally complete (GSIC) measurements, respectively, that are both not necessarily rank 1. We study the quantum separability problem by using these measurements and present separability criteria for bipartite systems with arbitrary dimensions and multipartite systems of multi-level subsystems. These criteria are proved to be more e…
Various forms of optimality for quantum observables described as normalized positive operator valued measures (POVMs) are studied in this paper. We give characterizations for observables that determine the values of the measured quantity with probabilistic certainty or a state of the system before or after the measurement. We investigate observables which are free from noise caused by classical post-processing, mixing, or pre-processing of quantum nature. Especially, a complete characterization of pre-processing and post-processing clean observables is given, and necessary and sufficient condi…
We introduce a measurement-based method for verifying quantum discord of any bipartite quantum system. We show that by performing an informationally complete POVM (IC-POVM) on one subsystem and checking the commutativity of the conditional states of the other subsystem, quantum discord from the second subsystem to the first can be verified. This is an improvement upon previous methods, which enables us to efficiently apply our method to continuous-variable systems, as IC-POVMs are readily available from homodyne or heterodyne measurements. We show that quantum discord for Gaussian states can b…
