A simple minimax estimator for quantum states

DOI10.1142/S0219749912500384MaRDI QIDQ4906467zbMATH OpenWikidataFDO

Authors Hui Khoon Ng, Berthold-Georg Englert

Publication date 11 February 2013

Published in International Journal of Quantum Information (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5136

zbMATH Keywords

Bayesianmaximum likelihoodminimaxquantum tomographystate estimation

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Variational principles of physics (49S05) Bayesian inference (62F15) Quantum state estimation, approximate cloning (81P50)

Abstract: Quantum tomography requires repeated measurements of many copies of the physical system, all prepared by a source in the unknown state. In the limit of very many copies measured, the often-used maximum-likelihood (ML) method for converting the gathered data into an estimate of the state works very well. For smaller data sets, however, it often suffers from problems of rank deficiency in the estimated state. For many systems of relevance for quantum information processing, the preparation of a very large number of copies of the same quantum state is still a technological challenge, which motivates us to look for estimation strategies that perform well even when there is not much data. In this article, we review the concept of minimax state estimation, and use minimax ideas to construct a simple estimator for quantum states. We demonstrate that, for the case of tomography of a single qubit, our estimator significantly outperforms the ML estimator for small number of copies of the state measured. Our estimator is always full-rank, and furthermore, has a natural dependence on the number of copies measured, which is missing in the ML estimator.

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Cites work

• How well can you know the edge of a quantum pyramid?
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1220667 (Why is no real title available?)
• Minimax estimation of the Wigner function in quantum homodyne tomography with ideal detectors
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Cited in

(13)

• Minimum Decision Cost for Quantum Ensembles
• Minimax estimation of qubit states with Bures risk
• Local solutions of maximum likelihood estimation in quantum state tomography
• A comparative study of estimation methods in quantum tomography
• Effect of non-negativity on estimation errors in one-qubit state tomography with finite data
• Minimax mean estimator for the trine
• Quantum tomography via compressed sensing: error bounds, sample complexity and efficient estimators
• Optimal error regions for quantum state estimation
• Spectral thresholding quantum tomography for low rank states
• Near-optimal quantum tomography: estimators and bounds
• The role of topology in quantum tomography
• Tasks and premises in quantum state determination
• Fast and simple quantum state estimation

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