Temporal State Tomography via Quantum Snapshotting the Temporal Quasiprobabilities
Abstract
Quantum tomography is a cornerstone of quantum information science, enabling the reconstruction of states and channels from experimental data. Here we introduce a new paradigm, temporal state tomography (TST), for reconstructing quantum processes across multiple times. Our approach is based on temporal quasiprobability distributions (TQDs), which, in the informationally complete setting, provide a complete description of multi-time quantum processes and uniquely determine temporal states. We formulate TST as a unified framework for reconstructing both density operators and quantum channels within a single scheme. We show that any TQD can be obtained via classical post-processing of measurement outcomes generated by a fixed set of quantum instruments, thereby establishing a direct operational route to accessing TQDs experimentally. For informationally complete TQDs, the associated temporal state can be reconstructed via a temporal Bloch-type representation. Leveraging this correspondence, we derive the sample complexity of TST, thereby quantifying its statistical efficiency.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.02655,
title = {Temporal State Tomography via Quantum Snapshotting the Temporal Quasiprobabilities},
author = {Zhian Jia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02655},
year = {2026}
}
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V1: 6+4 pages