The resources needed to conventionally characterize a quantum system are
overwhelmingly large for high- dimensional systems. This obstacle may be
overcome by abandoning traditional cornerstones of quantum measurement, such as
general quantum states, strong projective measurement, and assumption-free
characterization. Following this reasoning, we demonstrate an efficient
technique for characterizing high-dimensional, spatial entanglement with one
set of measurements. We recover sharp distributions with local, random
filtering of the same ensemble in momentum followed by position---something the
uncertainty principle forbids for projective measurements. Exploiting the
expectation that entangled signals are highly correlated, we use fewer than
5,000 measurements to characterize a 65, 536-dimensional state. Finally, we use
entropic inequalities to witness entanglement without a density matrix. Our
method represents the sea change unfolding in quantum measurement where methods
influenced by the information theory and signal-processing communities replace
unscalable, brute-force techniques---a progression previously followed by
classical sensing.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure
