Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Affiliates 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 ICAM-LANL 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Colloquia 
 Colloquia Archive 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 CMS Colloquia 
 Q-Mat Seminars 
 Q-Mat Seminars Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Kac Lectures 
 Kac Fellows 
 Dist. Quant. Lecture 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Colloquia 
 
 Jobs 
 Postdocs 
 CNLS Fellowship Application 
 Students 
 Student Program 
 Visitors 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Thursday, December 09, 2010
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Postdoc Seminar

Interval Estimates of Quantum States

Robin Blume-Kohout
T-4, CNLS

Experimentalists in quantum information science often validate their experiment by doing quantum state tomgraphy. They repeatedly produce a state and measure it (in various bases), then collate the data to arrive at a "best guess" for the system's density matrix. In this talk, I propose *interval estimates* as a powerful alternative. Instead of reporting a single state -- about which the best that can be said is that it is *probably* fairly close to the true state -- this method reports a convex region that contains the true state with (guaranteed) high probability. Thus, an interval estimate can form the basis of a rigorous logical statement about the state... which in turn can be used (e.g.) to design a fault tolerant quantum computer. I'll discuss how to design a confidence region estimator with guaranteed success probability, how to describe the result concisely, and how to derive a useful *point* estimator from it.

Host: Peter Loxley, loxley@lanl.gov