Fisher-Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements for Pure States

Phys Rev Lett. 2016 May 6;116(18):180402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.180402. Epub 2016 May 5.

Abstract

We introduce a new kind of quantum measurement that is defined to be symmetric in the sense of uniform Fisher information across a set of parameters that uniquely represent pure quantum states in the neighborhood of a fiducial pure state. The measurement is locally informationally complete-i.e., it uniquely determines these parameters, as opposed to distinguishing two arbitrary quantum states-and it is maximal in the sense of a multiparameter quantum Cramér-Rao bound. For a d-dimensional quantum system, requiring only local informational completeness allows us to reduce the number of outcomes of the measurement from a minimum close to but below 4d-3, for the usual notion of global pure-state informational completeness, to 2d-1.