Sample efficient tomography via Pauli Measurements

Abstract: Pauli Measurements are the most important measurements in both theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum information science. In this paper, we explore the power of Pauli measurements in the state tomography related problems. Firstly, we show that the \textit{quantum state tomography} problem of $n$-qubit system can be accomplished with ${\mathcal{O}}(\frac{10^n}{\epsilon^2})$ copies of the unknown state using Pauli measurements. As a direct application, we studied the \textit{quantum overlapping tomography} problem introduced by Cotler and Wilczek in Ref. \cite{Cotler_2020}. We show that the sample complexity is $\mathcal{O}(\frac{10^k\cdot\log({{n}\choose{k}}/\delta))}{\epsilon^{2}})$ for quantum overlapping tomography of $k$-qubit reduced density matrices among $n$ is quantum system, where $1-\delta$ is the confidential level, and $\epsilon$ is the trace distance error. This can be achieved using Pauli measurements. Moreover, we prove that $\Omega(\frac{\log(n/\delta)}{\epsilon^{2}})$ copies are needed. In other words, for constant $k$, joint, highly entangled, measurements are not asymptotically more efficient than Pauli measurements.