Experimental characterization of quantum processes: a selective and efficient method in arbitrary finite dimensions

Abstract

The temporal evolution of a quantum system can be characterized by quantum process tomography, a complex task that consumes a number of physical resources scaling exponentially with the number of subsystems. An alternative approach to the full reconstruction of a quantum channel is the selective and efficient quantum process tomography, a method that allows estimating, individually and up to the required accuracy, each element of the matrix that describes the process, using only a polynomial amount of resources. The implementation of this protocol is closely related to the possibility of building a complete set of mutually unbiased bases (MUBs), whose existence is known only when the dimension of the Hilbert space is the power of a prime number. However, an extension of the method that uses tensor products of maximal sets of MUBs has been recently introduced. Here we explicitly describe how to implement the algorithm for a selective and efficient estimation of a quantum process in a nonprime power dimension and conduct, an experimental verification of the method in a Hilbert space of dimension d = 6. This is the smallest space for which a complete set of MUBs is not known to exist, but it can be decomposed as a tensor product of two Hilbert spaces of dimensions D1 = 2 and D2 = 3, in which a complete set of MUBs is already known. The six-dimensional states were codified in the discretized transverse linear momentum of photons. The state preparation and detection stages are dynamically programed with the use of only-phase spatial light modulators, in a versatile experimental setup that allows one to implement the algorithm in any finite dimension.