No abstract

We report an experimental realization of adaptive Bayesian quantum state tomography for twoqubit states. Our implementation is based on the adaptive experimental design strategy proposed in [1] and provides an optimal measurement approach in terms of the information gain. We address the practical questions, which one faces in any experimental application: the influence of technical noise, and behavior of the tomographic algorithm for an easy to implement class of factorized measurements. In an experiment with polarization states of entangled photon pairs we observe a lower instrumental noise floor and superior reconstruction accuracy for nearly-pure states of the adaptive protocol compared to a non-adaptive. At the same time we show, that for the mixed states the restriction to factorized measurements results in no advantage for adaptive measurements, so general measurements have to be used.

No abstract

Reconfigurability of integrated photonic chips plays a key role in current experiments in the area of linear-optical quantum computing. We demonstrate a reconfigurable multiport interferometer implemented as a femtosecond laser-written integrated photonic device. The device includes a femtosecond laser-written 4 × 4 multiport interferometer equipped with 12 thermooptical phase shifters, making it a universal programmable linear-optical circuit. We achieve a record fast switching time for a single nested Mach-Zender interferometer of ∼ 10 ms and quantitatively analyse the reconfigurability of the optical circuit. We believe, that our results will improve the current state of quantum optical experiments utilizing femtosecond laser-written photonic circuits. arXiv:1805.05323v1 [physics.app-ph]

No abstract

Adaptive measurements were recently shown to significantly improve the performance of quantum state tomography. Utilizing information about the system for the on-line choice of optimal measurements allows to reach the ultimate bounds of precision for state reconstruction. In this article we generalize an adaptive Bayesian approach to the case of process tomography and experimentally show its superiority in the task of learning unknown quantum operations. Our experiments with photonic polarization qubits cover all types of single-qubit channels. We also discuss instrumental errors and the criteria for evaluation of the ultimate achievable precision in an experiment. It turns out, that adaptive tomography provides a lower noise floor in the presence of strong technical noise.

Entanglement is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics and holds great promise for enhancing metrology and communications. Much of the focus of quantum metrology so far has been on generating highly entangled quantum states that offer better sensitivity, per resource, than what can be achieved classically. However, to reach the ultimate limits in multi-parameter quantum metrology and quantum information processing tasks, collective measurements, which generate entanglement between multiple copies of the quantum state, are necessary. Here, we experimentally demonstrate theoretically optimal single- and two-copy collective measurements for simultaneously estimating two non-commuting qubit rotations. This allows us to implement quantum-enhanced sensing, for which the metrological gain persists for high levels of decoherence, and to draw fundamental insights about the interpretation of the uncertainty principle. We implement our optimal measurements on superconducting, trapped-ion and photonic systems, providing an indication of how future quantum-enhanced sensing networks may look.

We discuss an experimental realization of an adaptive quantum state tomography protocol. The method we suggested and tested takes advantage of a Bayesian approach to statistical inference and is naturally tailored for adaptive strategies. For pure states we observe close to 1/N scaling of infidelity with overall number of registered events N, while best non-adaptive protocols allow for 1 N scaling only. This is the theoretical limit for any tomographic protocol, and further improvement may only affect pre-factors in this power law. Also we consider particular strategies of the state reconstruction based on adequate and inadequate models and compare their scaling.Experiments have been performed for polarization qubits and ququarts, but the approach is readily adapted to any dimension. Our method does not take into account systematic errors caused, for example, by inaccuracies in retardant plates rotation. However for the reached values of infidelities of on the order of 10 -4 -10 -3 we did not observe any deviations from expected behavior and were not able to identify the influence of systematic errors.a Corresponding