Towards minimal self-testing of qubit states and measurements in prepare-and-measure scenarios

TL;DR

This paper introduces minimal semi-device-independent methods for self-testing qubit states and measurements in prepare-and-measure scenarios, demonstrating their effectiveness through theoretical constructions and experimental implementations on quantum processors.

Contribution

It develops new minimal self-testing protocols for qubit states and measurements in semi-DI settings, with experimental validation on IBM and IonQ quantum devices.

Findings

Successfully self-tested extremal POVMs with minimal preparations and measurements.

Implemented and validated the self-testing protocols on real quantum hardware.

Conjectured minimality of the proposed self-testing constructions.

Abstract

Self-testing is a promising approach to certifying quantum states or measurements. Originally, it relied solely on the outcome statistics of the measurements involved in a device-independent (DI) setup. Extra physical assumptions about the system make the setup semi-DI. In the latter approach, we consider a prepare-and-measure scenario in which the dimension of the mediating particle is assumed to be two. In a setup involving four (three) preparations and three (two) projective measurements in addition to the target, we exemplify how to self-test any four- (three-) outcome extremal positive operator-valued measure using a linear witness. One of our constructions also achieves self-testing of any number of states with the help of as many projective measurements as the dimensionality of the space spanned by the corresponding Bloch vectors. These constructions are conjectured to be minimal in terms of the number of preparations and measurements required. In addition, we implement one of our prepare-and-measure constructions on IBM and IonQ quantum processors and certify the existence of a complex qubit Hilbert space based on the data obtained from these experiments.