Petz recovery versus matrix reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper compares Petz recovery maps and matrix reconstruction methods for quantum state recovery, showing that matrix reconstruction is more broadly applicable and extending these methods to long-range measurements for improved quantum tomography.

Contribution

It demonstrates that matrix reconstruction can recover a larger set of states than Petz recovery and introduces long-range measurement techniques for enhanced quantum state tomography.

Findings

Matrix reconstruction succeeds on all states recoverable by Petz recovery.

Long-range measurements enable reconstruction of states not accessible via local measurements.

Extended methods improve quantum tomography for many-body systems.

Abstract

The reconstruction of the state of a multipartite quantum mechanical system represents a fundamental task in quantum information science. At its most basic, it concerns a state of a bipartite quantum system whose subsystems are subjected to local operations. We compare two different methods for obtaining the original state from the state resulting from the action of these operations. The first method involves quantum operations called Petz recovery maps, acting locally on the two subsystems. The second method is called matrix (or state) reconstruction and involves local, linear maps which are not necessarily completely positive. Moreover, we compare the quantities on which the maps employed in the two methods depend. We show that any state which admits Petz recovery also admits state reconstruction. However, the latter is successful for a strictly larger set of states. We also compare these methods in the context of a finite spin chain. Here, the state of a finite spin chain is reconstructed from the reduced states of a few neighbouring spins. In this setting, state reconstruction is the same as the MPO (i.e. matrix product operator) reconstruction proposed by Baumgratz et al. in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 020401 (2013)]. Finally, we generalize both these methods so that they employ long-range measurements instead of relying solely on short-range correlations embodied in such local reduced states. Long-range measurements enable the reconstruction of states which cannot be reconstructed from measurements of local few-body observables alone and hereby we improve existing methods for quantum state tomography of quantum many-body systems.