Experimental characterizations of a quantum system involve the measurement of
expectation values of observables for a preparable state |psi> of the quantum
system. Such expectation values can be measured by repeatedly preparing |psi>
and coupling the system to an apparatus. For this method, the precision of the
measured value scales as 1/sqrt(N) for N repetitions of the experiment. For the
problem of estimating the parameter phi in an evolution exp(-i phi H), it is
possible to achieve precision 1/N (the quantum metrology limit) provided that
sufficient information about H and its spectrum is available. We consider the
more general problem of estimating expectations of operators A with minimal
prior knowledge of A. We give explicit algorithms that approach precision 1/N
given a bound on the eigenvalues of A or on their tail distribution. These
algorithms are particularly useful for simulating quantum systems on quantum
computers because they enable efficient measurement of observables and
correlation functions. Our algorithms are based on a method for efficiently
measuring the complex overlap of |psi> and U|psi>, where U is an implementable
unitary operator. We explicitly consider the issue of confidence levels in
measuring observables and overlaps and show that, as expected, confidence
levels can be improved exponentially with linear overhead. We further show that
the algorithms given here can typically be parallelized with minimal increase
in resource usage.Comment: 22 page