Optimal experiment design for quantum state tomography of a molecular vibrational mode

Abstract

Optimal experiment design is used to collect a data set for the complete reconstruction of the vibrational quantum state of diatomic potassium molecules with maximum accuracy and a minimum number of experiments. The optimal configuration of experimental settings is obtained by minimizing the Cramér–Rao lower bound to the accuracy, which is attained in our reconstruction. The quantum state is reconstructed from the data set using maximum-likelihood estimation. Both optimal experiment design and maximum-likelihood estimation are solved efficiently as convex optimization problems.