Efficient measurement schemes for bosonic systems

Abstract

Boson is one of the most basic types of particles and preserves the commutation relation. An efficient way to measure a bosonic system is important not only for simulating complex physics phenomena of bosons (such as nuclei) on a qubit based quantum computer, but for extracting classical information from a quantum simulator/computer that itself is built with bosons (such as a continuous variable quantum computer). Extending the recently proposed measurement schemes for qubits, such as shadow tomography and other local measurement schemes, here we study efficient measurement approaches for bosonic systems. We consider truncated qudit and continuous variable systems, corresponding to simulated bosons on a discrete quantum computer and an inherent boson system, respectively, and propose different measurement schemes with theoretical analyses of the variances for these two cases. We numerically test the schemes for measuring nuclei vibrations simulated using a discrete quantum computer and a continuous variable Gaussian state, and the simulation results show great improvement of the performance of the proposed method compared to conventional ones.