English

Quantum-state tomography for spin-l systems

Quantum Physics 2009-11-10 v3

Abstract

We show that the density matrix of a spin-l system can be described entirely in terms of the measurement statistics of projective spin measurements along a minimum of 4l+1 different spin directions. It is thus possible to represent the complete quantum statistics of any N-level system within the spherically symmetric three dimensional space defined by the spin vector. An explicit method for reconstructing the density matrix of a spin-1 system from the measurement statistics of five non-orthogonal spin directions is presented and the generalization to spin-l systems is discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0310003,
  title  = {Quantum-state tomography for spin-l systems},
  author = {Holger F. Hofmann and Shigeki Takeuchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0310003},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

10 pages, including 2 tables, minor modifications in section II, final version for publication in Phys. Rev. A