Optimal parameter estimation of Pauli channels

Abstract

The optimal measurement configuration, i.e. the optimal input quantum state and measurement in the form of a positive operator-valued measure with two elements, is investigated in this paper for qubit and generalized Pauli channels. The channel directions are defined as the contracting directions of the channel with an arbitrary fixed basis of Pauli matrices. In the qubit Pauli channel case with known channel directions it is shown that the optimal configuration that maximizes the Fisher information of the estimated parameters consists of three von Neumann measurements together with pure input states directed to the appropriate channel directions. Extensions of these results for generalized Pauli channels are also given. Furthermore, a computationally efficient estimation method is proposed for estimating the channel directions in the qubit Pauli channel case. The efficiency of this method is illustrated by simulations: it is shown that its variance is of order 1/N, where N is the number of used measurements.