Characterizing Gaussian quantum processes with Gaussian resources

Abstract: Characterizing quantum processes is indispensable for the implementation of any task in quantum information processing. In this paper, we develop an efficient method to fully characterize arbitrary Gaussian processes in continuous-variable quantum systems. This is done by directly obtaining all elements of the symplectic matrix that describes the process. Only Gaussian resources such as coherent probes and quadrature measurements are needed for this task. The method is efficient, involving only $O(N^2)$ steps to characterize an $N$-mode system. Further, the method is resilient to uniform loss. We simulate this procedure using the Python package Strawberry Fields. We observe that heterodyne measurements outperform homodyne measurements for reconstructing Gaussian processes.