Optimal estimation of high-dimensional unitary transformations

We propose an estimation procedure for $d$-dimensional unitary transformations. For $d>2$, the unitary transformations close to the identity are estimated saturating the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound. For $d=2$, the estimation of all unitary transformations is also optimal with some prior information. We show through numerical simulations that, even in the absence of prior information, two-dimensional unitary transformations can be estimated with greater precision than by means of standard quantum process tomography.Comment: 8+14 pages, 6 figure