Experimental adaptive quantum tomography of two-qubit states

Abstract

We report an experimental realization of adaptive Bayesian quantum state tomography for two-qubit states. Our implementation is based on the adaptive experimental design strategy proposed in the work by Husz\'ar and Houlsby [F. Husz\'ar and N. M. T. Houlsby, Phys. Rev. A 85, 052120 (2012).] and provides an optimal measurement approach in terms of the information gain. We address the practical questions which one faces in any experimental application: the influence of technical noise and the behavior of the tomographic algorithm for an easy-to-implement class of factorized measurements. In an experiment with polarization states of entangled photon pairs, we observe a lower instrumental noise floor and superior reconstruction accuracy for nearly pure states of the adaptive protocol compared to a nonadaptive protocol. At the same time, we show that for the mixed states, the restriction to factorized measurements results in no advantage for adaptive measurements, so general measurements have to be used.