We describe a novel tool for the quantum characterization of optical devices. The experimental setup involves a stable reference state that undergoes an unknown quantum transformation and is then revealed by balanced homodyne detection. Through tomographic analysis on the homodyne data we are able to characterize the signal and to estimate parameters of the interaction, such as the loss of an optical component, or the gain of an amplifier. We present experimental results for coherent signals, with application to the estimation of losses introduced by simple optical components, and show how these results can be extended to the characterization of more general optical devices.
In the usual tomography of multipartite entangled quantum states one assumes that the measurement devices used in the laboratory are under perfect control of the experimenter. In this paper, using the so-called SWAP concept introduced recently, we show how one can remove this assumption in realistic experimental conditions and nevertheless be able to characterize the produced multipartite state based only on observed statistics. Such a black box tomography of quantum states is termed self-testing. As a function of the magnitude of the Bell violation, we are able to self-test emblematic multipa…
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…
Whereas in standard quantum state tomography one estimates an unknown state by performing various measurements with known devices, and whereas in detector tomography one estimates the POVM elements of a measurement device by subjecting to it various known states, we consider here the case of SPAM (state preparation and measurement) tomography where neither the states nor the measurement device are assumed known. For $d$-dimensional systems measured by $d$-outcome detectors, we find there are at most $d^2(d^2-1)$ "gauge" parameters that can never be determined by any such experiment, irrespecti…
Quantum tomography is the main method used to assess the quality of quantum information processing devices, but its complexity presents a major obstacle for the characterization of even moderately large systems. The number of experimental settings required to extract complete information about a device grows exponentially with its size, and so does the running time for processing the data generated by these experiments. Part of the problem is that tomography generates much more information than is usually sought. Taking a more targeted approach, we develop schemes that enable (i) estimating th…
The marriage of Quantum Physics and Information Technology, originally motivated by the need for miniaturization, has recently opened the way to the realization of radically new information-processing devices, with the possibility of guaranteed secure cryptographic communications, and tremendous speedups of some complex computational tasks. Among the many problems posed by the new information technology there is the need of characterizing the new quantum devices, making a complete identification and characterization of their functioning. As we will see, quantum mechanics provides us with a pow…
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…
Common tools for obtaining physical density matrices in experimental quantum state tomography are shown here to cause systematic errors. For example, using maximum likelihood or least squares optimization for state reconstruction, we observe a systematic underestimation of the fidelity and an overestimation of entanglement. A solution for this problem can be achieved by a linear evaluation of the data yielding reliable and computational simple bounds including error bars.
Linear optical circuits of growing complexity are playing an increasing role in emerging photonic quantum technologies. Individual photonic devices are typically described by a unitary matrix containing amplitude and phase information, the characterisation of which is a key task. We present a constructive scheme to retrieve the unitary matrix describing an arbitrary linear optical device using data obtained from one-photon and two-photon ensembles. The scheme is stable on the arbitrarily increasable length scale of the photon packet and independent of photon loss at input and output ports of t…
Encoding quantum information in the photon temporal mode (TM) offers a robust platform for high-dimensional quantum protocols. The main practical challenge, however, is to design a device that operates on single photons in specific TMs and all coherent superpositions. The quantum pulse gate (QPG) is a mode-selective sum-frequency generation designed for this task. Here, we perform a full modal characterisation of a QPG using weak coherent states in well-defined TMs. We reconstruct a full set of measurement operators, which show an average fidelity of 0.85 to a theoretically ideal device when o…
Quantum computation has been growing rapidly in both theory and experiments. In particular, quantum computing devices with a large number of qubits have been developed by IBM, Google, IonQ, and others. The current quantum computing devices are noisy intermediate-scale quantum $($NISQ$)$ devices, and so approaches to validate quantum processing on these quantum devices are needed. One of the most common ways of validation for an n-qubit quantum system is quantum tomography, which tries to reconstruct a quantum system's density matrix by a complete set of observables. However, the inherent noise…
As increasingly impressive quantum information processors are realized in laboratories around the world, robust and reliable characterization of these devices is now more urgent than ever. These diagnostics can take many forms, but one of the most popular categories is tomography, where an underlying parameterized model is proposed for a device and inferred by experiments. Here, we introduce and implement efficient operational tomography, which uses experimental observables as these model parameters. This addresses a problem of ambiguity in representation that arises in current tomographic app…
Self-calibrating quantum state tomography aims at reconstructing the unknown quantum state and certain properties of the measurement devices from the same data. Since the estimates of the state and device parameters come from the same data, one should employ a joint estimation scheme, including the construction and reporting of joint state-device error regions to quantify uncertainty. We explain how to do this naturally within the framework of optimal error regions. As an illustrative example, we apply our procedure to the double-crosshair measurement of the BB84 scenario in quantum cryptograp…
A recurring problem in quantum mechanics is to estimate either the state of a quantum system or the measurement operator applied to it. If we wish to estimate both, then the difficulty is that the state and the measurement always appear together: to estimate the state, we must use a measurement; to estimate the measurement operator, we must use a state. The data of such quantum estimation experiments come in the form of measurement frequencies. Ideally, the measured average frequencies can be attributed to an average state and an average measurement operator. If this is not the case, we have c…
Quantum tomography is an essential method of the photonic technology toolbox and is routinely used for evaluation of experimentally prepared states of light and characterization of devices transforming such states. The tomography procedure consists of many different sequentially performed measurements. We present considerable tomography speedup by optimally arranging the individual constituent measurements, which is equivalent to solving an instance of the traveling salesman problem. As an example, we obtain solutions for photonic systems of up to five qubits, and conclude that already for sys…
Characterizing the noise in the set of gate operations that form the building blocks of a quantum computational device is a necessity for assessing the quality of the device. Here, we introduce randomized linear gate set tomography, an easy-to-implement gate set tomography procedure that combines the idea of state-preparation-and-measurement-error-free characterization of standard gate set tomography with no-design randomized tomographic circuits and computational ease brought about by an appropriate linear approximation. We demonstrate the performance of our scheme through simulated examples …
Characterisation protocols have so far played a central role in the development of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers capable of impressive quantum feats. This trajectory is expected to continue in building the next generation of devices: ones that can surpass classical computers for particular tasks -- but progress in characterisation must keep up with the complexities of intricate device noise. A missing piece in the zoo of characterisation procedures is tomography which can completely describe non-Markovian dynamics over a given time frame. Here, we formally introduce a gener…
Recently quantum tomography has been proposed as a fundamental tool for prototyping a few qubit quantum device. It allows the complete reconstruction of the state produced from a given input into the device. From this reconstructed density matrix, relevant quantum information quantities such as the degree of entanglement and entropy can be calculated. Generally orthogonal measurements have been discussed for this tomographic reconstruction. In this paper, we extend the tomographic reconstruction technique to two new regimes. First we show how non-orthogonal measurement allow the reconstruction…
We demonstrate an efficient experimental procedure based on entanglement swapping to determine the Bell nonlocality measure of Horodecki et al. [Phys. Lett. A 200, 340 (1995)] and the fully-entangled fraction of Bennett et al. [Phys. Rev. A 54, 3824 (1996)] of an arbitrary two-qubit polarization-encoded state. The nonlocality measure corresponds to the amount of the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) optimized over all measurement settings. By using simultaneously two copies of a given state, we measure directly only six parameters. Our method requires neither full quantum stat…
Quantum tomography is currently the mainly employed method to assess the information of a system and therefore plays a fundamental role when trying to characterize the action of a particular channel. Nonetheless, quantum tomography requires the trust that the devices used in the laboratory perform state generation and measurements correctly. This work is based on the theoretical framework for the device-independent inference of quantum channels that was recently developed and experimentally implemented with superconducting qubits in [Dall'Arno, Buscemi, Vedral, arXiv:1805.01159] and [Dall'Arno…
Benchmarking and characterising quantum states and logic gates is essential in the development of devices for quantum computing. We introduce a Bayesian approach to self-consistent process tomography, called fast Bayesian tomography (FBT), and experimentally demonstrate its performance in characterising a two-qubit gate set on a silicon-based spin qubit device. FBT is built on an adaptive self-consistent linearisation that is robust to model approximation errors. Our method offers several advantages over other self-consistent tomographic methods. Most notably, FBT can leverage prior informatio…
Rigorous quantum state tomography for distributed quantum computing
Universidad de Concepción（康塞普西翁大学）；ICFO - Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（ICFO-光子科学研究所，巴塞罗那科学与技术研究院）
We demonstrate and verify quantum detector tomography of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) in a multiplexing scheme which permits measurement of up to 71000 photons per input pulse. We reconstruct the positive operator valued measure (POVM) of this device in the low photon-number regime, and use the extracted parameters to show the POVMs spanning the whole dynamic range of the device. We verify this by finding the mean photon number of a bright state. Our work shows that a reliable quantum description of large-scale SNSPD devices is possible, and should be applicable to…
The error model of a quantum computer is essential for optimizing quantum algorithms to minimize the impact of errors using quantum error correction or error mitigation. Noise with temporal correlations, e.g. low-frequency noise and context-dependent noise, is common in quantum computation devices and sometimes even significant. However, conventional tomography methods have not been developed for obtaining an error model describing temporal correlations. In this paper, we propose self-consistent tomography protocols to obtain a model of temporally correlated errors, and we demonstrate that our…
We introduce and demonstrate experimentally: (1) a framework called "gate set tomography" (GST) for self-consistently characterizing an entire set of quantum logic gates on a black-box quantum device; (2) an explicit closed-form protocol for linear-inversion gate set tomography (LGST), whose reliability is independent of pathologies such as local maxima of the likelihood; and (3) a simple protocol for objectively scoring the accuracy of a tomographic estimate without reference to target gates, based on how well it predicts a set of testing experiments. We use gate set tomography to characteriz…
The present short review article illustrates the latest theoretical developments on quantum tomography, regarding general optimization methods for both data-processing and setup. The basic theoretical tool is the informationally complete measurement. The optimization theory for the setup is based on the new theoretical approach of quantum combs.
We present an efficient and robust method for the reconstruction of photon number distributions by using solely thermal noise as a probe. The method uses a minimal number of pre-calibrated quantum devices, only one on/off single-photon detector is sufficient. Feasibility of the method is demonstrated by the experimental inference of single-photon, thermal and two-photon states. The method is stable to experimental imperfections and provides a direct, user-friendly quantum diagnostics tool.
The ability of fully reconstructing quantum maps is a fundamental task of quantum information, in particular when coupling with the environment and experimental imperfections of devices are taken into account. In this context we carry out a quantum process tomography (QPT) approach for a set of non trace-preserving maps. We introduce an operator $\OO$ to characterize the state dependent probability of success for the process under investigation. We also evaluate the result of approximating the process with a trace-preserving one.
As the method to completely characterize quantum dynamical processes, quantum process tomography (QPT) is vitally important for quantum information processing and quantum control, where the faithfulness of quantum devices plays an essential role. Here via weak measurements, we present a new QPT scheme characterized by its directness and parallelism. Comparing with the existing schemes, our scheme needs a simpler state preparation and much fewer experimental setups. Furthermore, each parameter of the quantum process is directly determined from only five experimental values in our scheme, meanin…
We introduce the concept of pairwise tomography networks to characterise quantum properties in many-body systems and demonstrate an efficient protocol to measure them experimentally. Pairwise tomography networks are generators of multiplex networks where each layer represents the graph of a relevant quantifier such as, e.g., concurrence, quantum discord, purity, quantum mutual information, or classical correlations. We propose a measurement scheme to perform two-qubit tomography of all pairs showing exponential improvement in the number of qubits $N$ with respect to previously existing methods…
We implement a compressive quantum state tomography capable of reconstructing any arbitrary low-rank spectral-temporal optical signal with extremely few measurement settings and without any \emph{ad hoc} assumptions about the initially unknown signal. This is carried out with a quantum pulse gate, a device that flexibly implements projections onto arbitrary user-specified optical modes. We present conclusive experimental results for both temporal pulsed modes and frequency bins, which showcase the versatility of our randomized compressive method and thereby introduce a universal optical recons…
Single Photon Detectors are integral to quantum optics and quantum information. Superconducting Nanowire based detectors exhibit new levels of performance, but have no accepted quantum optical model that is valid for multiple input photons. By performing Detector Tomography, we improve the recently proposed model [M.K. Akhlaghi and A.H. Majedi, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond. 19, 361 (2009)] and also investigate the manner in which these detectors respond nonlinearly to light, a valuable feature for some applications. We develop a device independent model for Single Photon Detectors that incorpor…
Procrustes Tomography -- reconstructing noisy quantum channels made easy
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩分校）；Quantum Science Institute, University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩分校量子科学研究所）；National Quantum Laboratory（国家量子实验室）
Quantum detector tomography is a fundamental technique for calibrating quantum devices and performing quantum engineering tasks. In this paper, we design optimal probe states for detector estimation based on the minimum upper bound of the mean squared error (UMSE) and the maximum robustness. We establish the minimum UMSE and the minimum condition number for quantum detectors and provide concrete examples that can achieve optimal detector tomography. In order to enhance the estimation precision, we also propose a two-step adaptive detector tomography algorithm to optimize the probe states adapt…
Quantum state tomography is an integral part of quantum computation and offers the starting point for the validation of various quantum devices. One of the central tasks in the field of state tomography is to reconstruct with high fidelity, the quantum states of a quantum system. From an experiment on a real quantum device, one can obtain the mean measurement values of different operators. With such a data as input, in this report we employ the maximal entropy formalism to construct the least biased mixed quantum state that is consistent with the given set of expectation values. Even though in…
Advancing quantum process tomography through quantum compilation
University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；Vietnam National University（越南国立大学）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Tohoku University（东北大学）
We address the problem of quantum process tomography with the preparators producing states correlated with the environmental degrees of freedom that play role in the system-environment interactions. We discuss the physical situations, in which the dynamics is described by nonlinear, or noncompletely positive transformations. In particular, we show that arbitrary mapping $\varrho_{\rm in}\to\varrho_{\rm out}$ can be realized by using appropriate set of preparators and applying the unitary operation SWAP. The experimental ``realization'' of perfect NOT operation is presented. We address the prob…
We have performed the first experimental tomographic reconstruction of a three-photon polarization state. Quantum state tomography is a powerful tool for fully describing the density matrix of a quantum system. We measured 64 three-photon polarization correlations and used a "maximum-likelihood" reconstruction method to reconstruct the GHZ state. The entanglement class has been characterized using an entanglement witness operator and the maximum predicted values for the Mermin inequality was extracted.
Quantum tomography is a widely applicable tool for complete characterization of quantum states and processes. In the present work, we develop a method for precision-guaranteed quantum process tomography. With the use of the Choi-Jamiolkowski isomorphism, we generalize the recently suggested extended norm minimization estimator for the case of quantum processes. Our estimator is based on the Hilbert-Schmidt distance for quantum processes. Specifically, we discuss the application of our method for characterizing quantum gates of a superconducting quantum processor in the framework of the IBM Q E…
Recent advances in quantum computers and simulators are steadily leading us towards full-scale quantum computing devices. Due to the fact that debugging is necessary to create any computing device, quantum tomography (QT) is a critical milestone on this path. In practice, the choice between different QT methods faces the lack of comparison methodology. Modern research provides a wide range of QT methods, which differ in their application areas, as well as experimental and computational complexity. Testing such methods is also being made under different conditions, and various efficiency measur…
The accurate and reliable characterization of quantum dynamical processes underlies efforts to validate quantum technologies, where discrimination between competing models of observed behaviors inform efforts to fabricate and operate qubit devices. We present a novel protocol for quantum channel discrimination that leverages advances in direct characterization of quantum dynamics (DCQD) codes. We demonstrate that DCQD codes enable selective process tomography to improve discrimination between entangling and correlated quantum dynamics. Numerical simulations show selective process tomography re…
Quantum state tomography is an essential tool for the characterization and verification of quantum states. However, as it cannot be directly applied to systems with more than a few qubits, efficient tomography of larger states on mid-sized quantum devices remains an important challenge in quantum computing. We develop a tomography approach that requires moderate computational and quantum resources for the tomography of states that can be approximated by Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians. The proposed method, Hamiltonian Learning Tomography, uses a Hamiltonian learning algorithm to get a param…
Extracting information from quantum devices has long been a crucial problem in the field of quantum mechanics. By performing elaborate measurements, quantum state tomography, an important and fundamental tool in quantum science and technology, can be used to determine unknown quantum states completely. In this study, we explore methods to determine multi-qubit pure quantum states uniquely and directly. Two adaptive protocols are proposed, with their respective quantum circuits. Herein, two or three observables are sufficient, while the number of measurement outcomes is either the same as or fe…
We propose a procedure for tomographic characterization of continuous variable quantum operations which employs homodyne detection and single-mode squeezed probe states with a fixed degree of squeezing and anti-squeezing and a variable displacement and orientation of squeezing ellipse. Density matrix elements of a quantum process matrix in Fock basis can be estimated by averaging well behaved pattern functions over the homodyne data. We show that this approach can be straightforwardly extended to characterization of quantum measurement devices. The probe states can be mixed, which makes the pr…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Research Center, The University of Tokyo（东京大学下一代人工智能研究中心）
Quantifying and verifying the control level in preparing a quantum state are central challenges in building quantum devices. The quantum state is characterized from experimental measurements, using a procedure known as tomography, which requires a vast number of resources. Furthermore, the tomography for a quantum device with temporal processing, which is fundamentally different from the standard tomography, has not been formulated. We develop a practical and approximate tomography method using a recurrent machine learning framework for this intriguing situation. The method is based on repeate…
Quantum tomography is an important tool for obtaining information about the quantum state from experimental data. In this study, we conduct a comparative analysis of various quantum tomography protocols, including protocols based on highly symmetric sets of state vectors, on mutually unbiased bases (MUB), and two-level transformations. Using the universal distribution for the fidelity of quantum state tomography, we estimate the fidelity and efficiency of quantum measurements for qudits of various dimensions as applied to a set of random states uniformly distributed over the Haar measure.
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…
Quantum computers solve ever more complex tasks using steadily growing system sizes. Characterizing these quantum systems is vital, yet becoming increasingly challenging. The gold-standard is quantum state tomography (QST), capable of fully reconstructing a quantum state without prior knowledge. Measurement and classical computing costs, however, increase exponentially in the system size - a bottleneck given the scale of existing and near-term quantum devices. Here, we demonstrate a scalable and practical QST approach that uses a single measurement setting, namely symmetric informationally com…
As the variety of commercially available quantum computers continues to increase so does the need for tools that can characterize, verify and validate these computers. This work explores using quantum state tomography for characterizing the performance of individual qubits and develops a vector field visualization for presentation of the results. The proposed protocol is demonstrated in simulation and on quantum computing hardware developed by IBM. The results identify qubit performance features that are not reflected in the standard models of this hardware, indicating opportunities to improve…
