Efficient quantum tomography

In the quantum state tomography problem, one wishes to estimate an unknown $d$-dimensional mixed quantum state $\rho$, given few copies. We show that $O(d/\epsilon)$ copies suffice to obtain an estimate $\hat{\rho}$ that satisfies $|\hat{\rho} - \rho|_F² \leq \epsilon$ (with high probability). An immediate consequence is that $O(\mathrm{rank}(\rho) \cdot d/\epsilon²⁾ \leq O(d^{2/\epsilon2)$} copies suffice to obtain an $\epsilon$-accurate estimate in the standard trace distance. This improves on the best known prior result of $O(d^{3/\epsilon2)$} copies for full tomography, and even on the best known prior result of $O(d^{2\log(d/\epsilon)/\epsilon2)$} copies for spectrum estimation. Our result is the first to show that nontrivial tomography can be obtained using a number of copies that is just linear in the dimension. Next, we generalize these results to show that one can perform efficient principal component analysis on $\rho$. Our main result is that $O(k d/\epsilon^2)$ copies suffice to output a rank-$k$ approximation $\hat{\rho}$ whose trace distance error is at most $\epsilon$ more than that of the best rank-$k$ approximator to $\rho$. This subsumes our above trace distance tomography result and generalizes it to the case when $\rho$ is not guaranteed to be of low rank. A key part of the proof is the analogous generalization of our spectrum-learning results: we show that the largest $k$ eigenvalues of $\rho$ can be estimated to trace-distance error $\epsilon$ using $O(k^{2/\epsilon2)$} copies. In turn, this result relies on a new coupling theorem concerning the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth algorithm that should be of independent combinatorial interest.