Full Tomography from Compatible Measurements

Abstract

We put forward a reconstruction scheme prompted by the relation between a von Neumann measurement and the corresponding informationally complete measurement induced in a relevant reconstruction subspace. This method is especially suited for the full tomography of complex quantum systems, where the intricacies of the detection part of the experiment can be greatly reduced provided some prior information is available. In broader terms this shows the importance of prior information in quantum theory. The proposed technique is illustrated with an experimental tomography of photonic vortices of moderate dimension.