TY - JOUR T1 - Quantum state tomography via reduced density matrices JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2017 A1 - Tao Xin A1 - Dawei Lu A1 - Joel Klassen A1 - Nengkun Yu A1 - Zhengfeng Ji A1 - Jianxin Chen A1 - Xian Ma A1 - Guilu Long A1 - Bei Zeng A1 - Raymond Laflamme AB -

Quantum state tomography via local measurements is an efficient tool for characterizing quantum states. However it requires that the original global state be uniquely determined (UD) by its local reduced density matrices (RDMs). In this work we demonstrate for the first time a class of states that are UD by their RDMs under the assumption that the global state is pure, but fail to be UD in the absence of that assumption. This discovery allows us to classify quantum states according to their UD properties, with the requirement that each class be treated distinctly in the practice of simplifying quantum state tomography. Additionally we experimentally test the feasibility and stability of performing quantum state tomography via the measurement of local RDMs for each class. These theoretical and experimental results advance the project of performing efficient and accurate quantum state tomography in practice.

VL - 118 U4 - 020401 UR - http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.020401 U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.020401 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Tomography is necessary for universal entanglement detection with single-copy observables JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2016 A1 - Dawei Lu A1 - Tao Xin A1 - Nengkun Yu A1 - Zhengfeng Ji A1 - Jianxin Chen A1 - Guilu Long A1 - Jonathan Baugh A1 - Xinhua Peng A1 - Bei Zeng A1 - Raymond Laflamme AB - Entanglement, one of the central mysteries of quantum mechanics, plays an essential role in numerous applications of quantum information theory. A natural question of both theoretical and experimental importance is whether universal entanglement detection is possible without full state tomography. In this work, we prove a no-go theorem that rules out this possibility for any non-adaptive schemes that employ single-copy measurements only. We also examine in detail a previously implemented experiment, which claimed to detect entanglement of two-qubit states via adaptive single-copy measurements without full state tomography. By performing the experiment and analyzing the data, we demonstrate that the information gathered is indeed sufficient to reconstruct the state. These results reveal a fundamental limit for single-copy measurements in entanglement detection, and provides a general framework to study the detection of other interesting properties of quantum states, such as the positivity of partial transpose and the k-symmetric extendibility. VL - 116 U4 - 230501 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00581 CP - 23 U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.230501 ER -