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Five measurement bases determine pure quantum states on any dimension

Quantum Physics 2015-09-02 v2

Abstract

A long standing problem in quantum mechanics is the minimum number of observables required for the characterisation of unknown pure quantum states. The solution to this problem is specially important for the developing field of high-dimensional quantum information processing. In this work we demonstrate that any pure d-dimensional state is unambiguously reconstructed by measuring 5 observables, that is, via projective measurements onto the states of 5 orthonormal bases. Thus, in our method the total number of different measurement outcomes (5d) scales linearly with d. The state reconstruction is robust against experimental errors and requires simple post-processing, regardless of d. We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our scheme through the reconstruction of 8-dimensional quantum states, encoded in the momentum of single photons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.2789,
  title  = {Five measurement bases determine pure quantum states on any dimension},
  author = {D. Goyeneche and G. Cañas and S. Etcheverry and E. S. Gómez and G. B. Xavier and G. Lima and A. Delgado},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2789},
  year   = {2015}
}

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