Quadrature Histograms in Maximum Likelihood Quantum State Tomography

Published

August 22, 2018

Author(s)

Leonardo E. Silva, Scott Glancy, Hilma H. Macedo De Vasconcelos

Abstract

Quantum state tomography aims to determine the quantum state of a system from measured data and is an essential tool for quantum information science. When dealing with continuous variable quantum states of light, tomography is often done by measuring the field amplitudes at different optical phases using homodyne detection. The quadrature-phase homodyne measurement outputs a continuous variable, so to reduce the computational cost of tomography, researchers often discretize the measurements into histogram bin. We show that this can be done without significantly degrading the fidelity of the estimated state. This paper tests different strategies for determining the histogram bin widths. We show that computation time can be significantly reduced with little fidelity loss when the measurement operators corresponding to each histogram bin are integrated over the bin width.

Citation

Physical Review A

Volume

98

Issue

2

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

DOI Link

Keywords

quantum information, quantum tomography, homodyne detection, histogram

Citation

Silva, L. , Glancy, S. and Macedo De Vasconcelos, H. (2018), Quadrature Histograms in Maximum Likelihood Quantum State Tomography, Physical Review A, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.98.022325 (Accessed October 9, 2025)