A geometrical relation between symmetric operators and mutually unbiased operators

In this work we study the relation between the set of symmetric operators and the set of mutually unbiased operators from finite plane geometry point of view. Here symmetric operators are generalization of symmetric informationally complete probability-operator measurements (SIC POMs), while mutually unbiased operators are the operator generalization of mutually unbiased bases (MUB). We also discuss the implication of this relation to the particular cases of rank-1 SIC POMs and MUB.Comment: comments are welcom

Classical States and Their Quantum Correspondence

We point out a correspondence between classical and quantum states, by showing that for every classical distribution over phase--space, one can construct a corresponding quantum state, such that in the classical limit of $\hbar\to 0$ the latter converges to the former with respect to all measurable quantities.Comment: 8 pages. We have taken a different path in showing that the classical--quantum correspondence still holds under time evolutio

Mini-Bucket Heuristics for Improved Search

The paper is a second in a series of two papers evaluating the power of a new scheme that generates search heuristics mechanically. The heuristics are extracted from an approximation scheme called mini-bucket elimination that was recently introduced. The first paper introduced the idea and evaluated it within Branch-and-Bound search. In the current paper the idea is further extended and evaluated within Best-First search. The resulting algorithms are compared on coding and medical diagnosis problems, using varying strength of the mini-bucket heuristics. Our results demonstrate an effective search scheme that permits controlled tradeoff between preprocessing (for heuristic generation) and search. Best-first search is shown to outperform Branch-and-Bound, when supplied with good heuristics, and sufficient memory space.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1999

Construction of all general symmetric informationally complete measurements

We construct the set of all general (i.e. not necessarily rank 1) symmetric informationally complete (SIC) positive operator valued measures (POVMs). In particular, we show that any orthonormal basis of a real vector space of dimension d^2-1 corresponds to some general SIC POVM and vice versa. Our constructed set of all general SIC-POVMs contains weak SIC-POVMs for which each POVM element can be made arbitrarily close to a multiple times the identity. On the other hand, it remains open if for all finite dimensions our constructed family contains a rank 1 SIC-POVM.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Mutually unbiased measurements in finite dimensions

We generalize the concept of mutually unbiased bases (MUB) to measurements which are not necessarily described by rank one projectors. As such, these measurements can be a useful tool to study the long standing problem of the existence of MUB. We derive their general form, and show that in a finite, $d$-dimensional Hilbert space, one can construct a complete set of $d+1$ mutually unbiased measurements. Beside of their intrinsic link to MUB, we show, that these measurements' statistics provide complete information about the state of the system. Moreover, they capture the physical essence of unbiasedness, and in particular, they satisfy non-trivial entropic uncertainty relation similar to $d+1$ MUB.Comment: 5 pages, 4 pages Supplementary Information, 1 figur

Fidelity-optimized quantum state estimation

We describe an optimized, self-correcting procedure for the Bayesian inference of pure quantum states. By analyzing the history of measurement outcomes at each step, the procedure returns the most likely pure state, as well as the optimal basis for the measurement that is to follow. The latter is chosen to maximize, on average, the fidelity of the most likely state after the measurement. We also consider a practical variant of this protocol, where the available measurement bases are restricted to certain limited sets of bases. We demonstrate the success of our method by considering in detail the single-qubit and two-qubit cases, and comparing the performance of our method against other existing methods.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

The No-Broadcasting Theorem and its Classical Counterpart

Although it is widely accepted that `no-broadcasting' -- the nonclonability of quantum information -- is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, an impossibility theorem for the broadcasting of general density matrices has not yet been formulated. In this paper, we present a general proof for the no-broadcasting theorem, which applies to arbitrary density matrices. The proof relies on entropic considerations, and as such can also be directly linked to its classical counterpart, which applies to probabilistic distributions of statistical ensembles.Comment: 4 page

Encoding secret information in measurement settings

Secure communication protocols are often formulated in a paradigm where the message is encoded in measurement outcomes. In this work we propose a rather unexplored framework in which the message is encoded in measurement settings rather than in their outcomes. In particular, we study two different variants of such secure communication protocols in which the message alphabet corresponds to measurement settings of mutually unbiased bases.Comment: 4 page

Rigidity of the magic pentagram game

A game is rigid if a near-optimal score guarantees, under the sole assumption of the validity of quantum mechanics, that the players are using an approximately unique quantum strategy. Rigidity has a vital role in quantum cryptography as it permits a strictly classical user to trust behavior in the quantum realm. This property can be traced back as far as 1998 (Mayers and Yao) and has been proved for multiple classes of games. In this paper we prove ridigity for the magic pentagram game, a simple binary constraint satisfaction game involving two players, five clauses and ten variables. We show that all near-optimal strategies for the pentagram game are approximately equivalent to a unique strategy involving real Pauli measurements on three maximally-entangled qubit pairs.Comment: v1: 7 pages, 2 figures; v2: closer to published versio

Iterative Join-Graph Propagation

The paper presents an iterative version of join-tree clustering that applies the message passing of join-tree clustering algorithm to join-graphs rather than to join-trees, iteratively. It is inspired by the success of Pearl's belief propagation algorithm as an iterative approximation scheme on one hand, and by a recently introduced mini-clustering i. success as an anytime approximation method, on the other. The proposed Iterative Join-graph Propagation IJGP belongs to the class of generalized belief propagation methods, recently proposed using analogy with algorithms in statistical physics. Empirical evaluation of this approach on a number of problem classes demonstrates that even the most time-efficient variant is almost always superior to IBP and MC i, and is sometimes more accurate by as much as several orders of magnitude.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2002