Characterization of a noisy quantum process by complementary classical operations

Abstract

One of the challenges in quantum information is the demonstration of quantum coherence in the operations of experimental devices. While full quantum process tomography can do the job, it is both cumbersome and unintuitive. In this presentation, we show that a surprisingly detailed and intuitively accessible characterization of errors is possible by measuring the error statistics of only two complementary classical operations of a quantum gate.

6 pages, including 5 tables, contribution to the proceedings of QIT15, held November 21st to 22nd 2006 in Kyoto