Pure-State Quantum Tomography with Minimal Rank-One POVMs

TL;DR

This paper establishes minimal rank-one POVMs for pure-state quantum tomography, providing sharp bounds on their size and explicit constructions, thus advancing efficient quantum state reconstruction methods.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of vital rank-one POVMs, proves upper bounds on their size in real and complex dimensions, and offers explicit constructions achieving these bounds.

Findings

Sharp upper bounds on vital rank-one POVM size in real and complex dimensions.

Explicit constructions of minimal vital rank-one POVMs.

Connection between block designs and vital POVMs in the real case.

Abstract

Quantum state tomography seeks to reconstruct an unknown state from measurement statistics. A finite measurement (POVM) is \emph{pure-state informationally complete} (PSI-Complete) if the outcome probabilities determine any pure state up to a global phase. We study \emph{rank-one} POVMs that are minimally sufficient for this task. We call such a POVM \emph{vital} if it is PSI-Complete but every proper subcollection is not PSI-Complete. We prove sharp upper bounds on the size of vital rank-one POVMs in dimension \(n\): the size is at most \(\binom{n+1}{2}\) over \(\mathbb{R}\) and at most \(n^{2}\) over \(\mathbb{C}\), and we give constructions that attain these bounds. In the real case, we further exhibit a connection to block designs: whenever \(w \mid n(n-1)\), an \((n,w,w-1)\) design produces a vital rank-one POVM with \(n + n(n-1)/w\) outcomes. We provide explicit constructions for \(w=2,n-1\), and \(n\).