Priority Choice Experimental Two-qubit Tomography: Measuring One by One All Elements of Density Matrices

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates an optimal two-qubit tomography method that measures each density matrix element individually, achieving higher stability and lower errors compared to traditional tomographic protocols.

Contribution

The authors implement and compare an optimal one-by-one element measurement method with traditional protocols for two-qubit states, showing improved accuracy and error stability.

Findings

Optimal tomography yields the smallest uncertainty circles.

The method provides stable reconstruction within the uncertainty bounds.

Compared to other protocols, it shows higher robustness against experimental errors.

Abstract

In standard optical tomographic methods, the off-diagonal elements of a density matrix $\rho$ are measured indirectly. Thus, the reconstruction of $\rho$, even if it is based on linear inversion, typically magnifies small errors in the experimental data. Recently, an optimal tomography [Phys. Rev. A 90, 062123 (2014)] has been proposed theoretically to measure one-by-one all the elements of $\rho$. Thus, the relative errors in the reconstructed state can be the same as those in the experimental data. We implemented this method for two-qubit polarization states performing both local and global measurements. For comparison, we also experimentally implemented other well-known tomographic protocols based solely on local measurements (of, e.g., the Pauli operators and James-Kwiat-Munro-White projectors) and those with mutually unbiased bases requiring both local and global measurements. We reconstructed seventeen of two-qubit polarization states including separable, partially and maximally entangled. Our experiments show the highest stability against errors of our method in comparison to the other quantum tomographies. In particular, we demonstrate that each optimally-reconstructed state} is embedded in the uncertainty circle of the smallest radius, both in terms of the trace distance and disturbance. We explain how to estimate experimentally the uncertainty radii for all the implemented tomographies and show that, for each reconstructed state, the relevant uncertainty circles intersect indicating the approximate location of the corresponding physical density matrix.