Quantum State Tomography of a Single Qubit: Comparison of Methods

Roman Schmied

Published 2014-07-17, updated 2015-01-28Version 2

We present an overview of different tomographic methods for determining the quantum-mechanical density matrix of a single qubit: (scaled) direct inversion, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), minimum Fisher information distance, and Bayesian mean estimation (BME). We discuss the different prior densities in the space of density matrices, on which both MLE and BME depend, as well as ways of including experimental errors and of estimating tomography errors. As a measure of the accuracy of these methods we average the trace distance between a given density matrix and the tomographic density matrices it can give rise to through experimental measurements. We find that the BME provides the most accurate estimate of the density matrix, and suggest using either the pure-state prior, if the system is known to be in a rather pure state, or the Bures prior if any state is possible. The MLE is found to be slightly less accurate. We comment on the extrapolation of these results to larger systems.