Structure of Two-qubit Symmetric Informationally Complete POVMs

In the four-dimensional Hilbert space, there exist 16 Heisenberg--Weyl (HW) covariant symmetric informationally complete positive operator valued measures (SIC~POVMs) consisting of 256 fiducial states on a single orbit of the Clifford group. We explore the structure of these SIC~POVMs by studying the symmetry transformations within a given SIC~POVM and among different SIC~POVMs. Furthermore, we find 16 additional SIC~POVMs by a regrouping of the 256 fiducial states, and show that they are unitarily equivalent to the original 16 SIC~POVMs by establishing an explicit unitary transformation. We then reveal the additional structure of these SIC~POVMs when the four-dimensional Hilbert space is taken as the tensor product of two qubit Hilbert spaces. In particular, when either the standard product basis or the Bell basis are chosen as the defining basis of the HW group, in eight of the 16 HW covariant SIC~POVMs, all fiducial states have the same concurrence of $\sqrt{2/5}$. These SIC~POVMs are particularly appealing for an experimental implementation, since all fiducial states can be connected to each other with just local unitary transformations. In addition, we introduce a concise representation of the fiducial states with the aid of a suitable tabular arrangement of their parameters.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, 5 table

Towards optimal quantum tomography with unbalanced homodyning

Balanced homodyning, heterodyning and unbalanced homodyning are the three well-known sampling techniques used in quantum optics to characterize all possible photonic sources in continuous-variable quantum information theory. We show that for all quantum states and all observable-parameter tomography schemes, which includes the reconstructions of arbitrary operator moments and phase-space quasi-distributions, localized sampling with unbalanced homodyning is always tomographically more powerful (gives more accurate estimators) than delocalized sampling with heterodyning. The latter is recently known to often give more accurate parameter reconstructions than conventional marginalized sampling with balanced homodyning. This result also holds for realistic photodetectors with subunit efficiency. With examples from first- through fourth-moment tomography, we demonstrate that unbalanced homodyning can outperform balanced homodyning when heterodyning fails to do so. This new benchmark takes us one step towards optimal continuous-variable tomography with conventional photodetectors and minimal experimental components.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

Numerical Estimation Schemes for Quantum Tomography

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH