State-preparation-and-measurement Research Articles

Loop state-preparation-and-measurement tomography of a two-qubit system

We experimentally demonstrate that loop state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) tomography is capable of detecting correlated errors in a two-qubit system. We prepare photon pairs in a state that approximates a Werner state, which may or may not be entangled. By performing measurements with multiple different detector settings we are able to detect correlated errors between two single-qubit measurements performed in different locations. No assumptions are made concerning either the state preparations or the measurements, other than that the dimensions of the states and the positive-operator-valued measures describing the detectors are known. The only other needed information is experimentally measured expectation values, which are analyzed for self-consistency. This demonstrates that loop SPAM tomography is a useful technique for detecting errors that would degrade the performance of multiple-qubit quantum information processors.

Nonholonomic tomography. II. Detecting correlations in multiqudit systems

In the context of quantum tomography, quantities called a partial determinants\cite{jackson2015detecting} were recently introduced. PDs (partial determinants) are explicit functions of the collected data which are sensitive to the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) correlations. In this paper, we demonstrate further applications of the PD and its generalizations. In particular we construct methods for detecting various types of SPAM correlation in multiqudit systems | e.g. measurement-measurement correlations. The relationship between the PDs of each method and the correlations they are sensitive to is topological. We give a complete classification scheme for all such methods but focus on the explicit details of only the most scalable methods, for which the number of settings scale as $\mathcal{O}(d^4)$. This paper is the second of a two part series where the first paper[2] is about theoretical perspectives of the PD and its interpretation as a holonomy.

Experimental demonstration of loop state-preparation-and-measurement tomography

We have performed an experiment demonstrating that loop state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) tomography [C. Jackson and S. J. van Enk, Phys. Rev. A 92, 042312 (2015)] is capable of detecting correlated errors between the preparation and the measurement of a quantum system. Specifically, we have prepared pure and mixed states of single qubits encoded in the polarization of heralded individual photons. By performing measurements using multiple state preparations and multiple measurement device settings we are able to detect if there are any correlated errors between them, and are also able to determine which state preparations are correlated with which measurements. This is accomplished by going around a 'loop' in parameter space, which allows us to check for self-consistency. No assumptions are made concerning either the state preparations or the measurements, other than that the dimensions of the states and the positive-operator-valued measures (POVM) describing the detector are known. In cases where no correlations are found we are able to perform quantum state tomography of the polarization qubits by using knowledge of the detector POVMs, or quantum detector tomography by using knowledge of the state preparations.

Detecting correlated errors in state-preparation-and-measurement tomography

Whereas in standard quantum state tomography one estimates an unknown state by performing various measurements with known devices, and whereas in detector tomography one estimates the POVM elements of a measurement device by subjecting to it various known states, we consider here the case of SPAM (state preparation and measurement) tomography where neither the states nor the measurement device are assumed known. For $d$-dimensional systems measured by $d$-outcome detectors, we find there are at most $d^2(d^2-1)$ "gauge" parameters that can never be determined by any such experiment, irrespective of the number of unknown states and unknown devices. For the case $d=2$ we find new gauge-invariant quantities that can be accessed directly experimentally and that can be used to detect and describe SPAM errors. In particular, we identify conditions whose violations detect the presence of correlations between SPAM errors. From the perspective of SPAM tomography, standard quantum state tomography and detector tomography are protocols that fix the gauge parameters through the assumption that some set of fiducial measurements is known or that some set of fiducial states is known, respectively.