Unambiguous discriminator for unknown quantum states: An implementation

Abstract

We give a scheme for a physical implementation of the programmable state discriminator that unambiguously discriminates between two unknown qubit states with optimal probability of success. One copy of each of the unknown states is provided as input, or program, for the two program registers, and the data state, which is guaranteed to be prepared in one of the program states, is fed into the data register of the device. This device will then tell us, in an optimal way, which of the templates stored in the program registers the data state matches. The implementation is based on Neumark's theorem. We introduce a single qubit as ancilla and a unitary operator that entangles the system with the ancilla in such a way that projective measurements performed in the computational basis of the system plus ancilla transform the initial system states according to the optimal positive-operator-valued measure.