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Published on: May 30, 2014
Improving quantum state estimation with mutually unbiased bases
1Centre for Quantum Information Quantum Control and Institute for Optical Sciences, Department of Physics,60 St. George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A7.
Abstract:
When used in quantum state estimation, projections onto mutually unbiased bases have the ability to maximize information extraction per measurement and to minimize redundancy. We present the first experimental demonstration of quantum state tomography of two-qubit polarization states to take advantage of mutually unbiased bases. We demonstrate improved state estimation as compared to standard measurement strategies and discuss how this can be understood from the structure of the measurements we use. We experimentally compared our method to the standard state estimation method for three different states and observe that the infidelity was up to 1.84 ± 0.06 times lower by using our technique than it was by using standard state estimation methods.
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