TY - JOUR T1 - Optimized tomography of continuous variable systems using excitation counting JF - Physical Review A Y1 - 2016 A1 - Shen, Chao A1 - Heeres, Reinier W. A1 - Reinhold, Philip A1 - Jiang, Luyao A1 - Yi-Kai Liu A1 - Schoelkopf, Robert J. A1 - Jiang, Liang AB -

We propose a systematic procedure to optimize quantum state tomography protocols for continuous variable systems based on excitation counting preceded by a displacement operation. Compared with conventional tomography based on Husimi or Wigner function measurement, the excitation counting approach can significantly reduce the number of measurement settings. We investigate both informational completeness and robustness, and provide a bound of reconstruction error involving the condition number of the sensing map. We also identify the measurement settings that optimize this error bound, and demonstrate that the improved reconstruction robustness can lead to an order-of-magnitude reduction of estimation error with given resources. This optimization procedure is general and can incorporate prior information of the unknown state to further simplify the protocol.

VL - 94 U4 - 052327 UR - http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.94.052327 U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevA.94.052327 ER -