Optimal Pure-State Qubit Tomography via Sequential Weak Measurements.

The spin-coherent-state positive-operator-valued-measure (POVM) is a fundamental measurement in quantum science, with applications including tomography, metrology, teleportation, benchmarking, and measurement of Husimi phase space probabilities. We prove that this POVM is achieved by collectively measuring the spin projection of an ensemble of qubits weakly and isotropically. We apply this in the context of optimal tomography of pure qubits. We show numerically that through a sequence of weak measurements of random directions of the collective spin component, sampled discretely or in a continuous measurement with random controls, one can approach the optimal bound.

Fisher-Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements for Pure States.

We introduce a new kind of quantum measurement that is defined to be symmetric in the sense of uniform Fisher information across a set of parameters that uniquely represent pure quantum states in the neighborhood of a fiducial pure state. The measurement is locally informationally complete-i.e., it uniquely determines these parameters, as opposed to distinguishing two arbitrary quantum states-and it is maximal in the sense of a multiparameter quantum Cramér-Rao bound. For a d-dimensional quantum system, requiring only local informational completeness allows us to reduce the number of outcomes of the measurement from a minimum close to but below 4d-3, for the usual notion of global pure-state informational completeness, to 2d-1.

Choice of measurement as the signal.

In classical mechanics, performing a measurement without reading the measurement outcome is equivalent to not exploiting the measurement at all. A nonselective measurement in the classical realm carries no information. Here we show that the situation is remarkably different when quantum mechanical systems are concerned. A nonselective measurement on one part of a maximally entangled pair can allow communication between two parties. In the proposed protocol, the signal is encoded in the choice of the measurement basis of one of the communicating parties, while the outcomes of the measurement are irrelevant for the communication and therefore may be discarded. Different choices for the (nonselective) measurement correspond to different signals. The implication of the study of measurements in quantum mechanics is considered. The scheme is studied in a Hilbert space of prime dimension.

Noncommuting conserved charges in quantum many-body thermalization.

In statistical mechanics, a small system exchanges conserved quantities-heat, particles, electric charge, etc.-with a bath. The small system thermalizes to the canonical ensemble or the grand canonical ensemble, etc., depending on the quantities. The conserved quantities are represented by operators usually assumed to commute with each other. This assumption was removed within quantum-information-theoretic (QI-theoretic) thermodynamics recently. The small system's long-time state was dubbed "the non-Abelian thermal state (NATS)." We propose an experimental protocol for observing a system thermalize to the NATS. We illustrate with a chain of spins, a subset of which forms the system of interest. The conserved quantities manifest as spin components. Heisenberg interactions push the conserved quantities between the system and the effective bath, the rest of the chain. We predict long-time expectation values, extending the NATS theory from abstract idealization to finite systems that thermalize with finite couplings for finite times. Numerical simulations support the analytics: The system thermalizes to near the NATS, rather than to the canonical prediction. Our proposal can be implemented with ultracold atoms, nitrogen-vacancy centers, trapped ions, quantum dots, and perhaps nuclear magnetic resonance. This work introduces noncommuting conserved quantities from QI-theoretic thermodynamics into quantum many-body physics: atomic, molecular, and optical physics and condensed matter.

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.

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 Letter, 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.