Two measurement bases are asymptotically informationally complete for any pure state tomography

Abstract

One of the fundamental questions in quantum information theory is to find how many measurement bases are required to obtain the full information of a quantum state. While a minimum of four measurement bases is typically required to determine an arbitrary pure state, we prove that for any states generated by finite-depth Clifford + T circuits, just two measurement bases are sufficient. More generally, we prove that two measurement bases are informationally complete for determining algebraic pure states whose state-vector elements represented in the computational basis are algebraic numbers. Since any pure state can be asymptotically approximated by a sequence of algebraic states with arbitrarily high precision, our scheme is referred to as asymptotically informationally complete for pure state tomography. Furthermore, existing works mostly construct the measurements using entangled bases. So far, the best result requires $O(n)$ local measurement bases for $n$-qubit pure-state tomography. Here, we show that two measurement bases that involve polynomial elementary gates are sufficient for uniquely determining sparse algebraic states. Moreover, we prove that two local measurement bases, involving single-qubit local operations only, are informationally complete for certain algebraic states, such as GHZ-like and W-like states. Besides, our two-measurement-bases scheme remains valid for mixed states with certain types of noises. We numerically test the uniqueness of the reconstructed states under two (local) measurement bases with and without measurement and depolarising types of noise. Our scheme provides a theoretical guarantee for pure state tomography in the fault-tolerant quantum computing regime.