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On the Measurement of Qubits

2 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

We describe in detail the theory underpinning the measurement of density matrices of a pair of quantum two-level systems (``qubits''). Our particular emphasis is on qubits realized by the two polarization degrees of freedom of a pair of entangled photons generated in a down-conversion experiment; however the discussion applies in general, regardless of the actual physical realization. Two techniques are discussed, namely a tomographic reconstruction (in which the density matrix is linearly related to a set of measured quantities) and a maximum likelihood technique which requires numerical optimization (but has the advantage of producing density matrices which are always non-negative definite). In addition a detailed error analysis is presented, allowing errors in quantities derived from the density matrix, such as the entropy or entanglement of formation, to be estimated. Examples based on down-conversion experiments are used to illustrate our results.

years

2026 2

representative citing papers

Connecting Quantum Tomography and Quantum Retrodiction

quant-ph · 2026-06-22 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

The Petz recovery map equals the gradient of the log-likelihood in maximum-likelihood tomography, unifying retrodiction and state reconstruction via a shared iterative procedure.

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