Quantum state tomography--the practice of estimating a quantum state by performing measurements on it--is useful in a variety of contexts. We introduce "gentle tomography" as a version of tomography that preserves the measured quantum data. As an application of gentle tomography, we describe a simple polynomial-time method for universal source coding.
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0403078,
title = {Universal quantum data compression via gentle tomography},
author = {Charles H. Bennett and Aram W. Harrow and Seth Lloyd},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0403078},
year = {2007}
}