Provable compressed sensing quantum state tomography via non-convex methods

Abstract With nowadays steadily growing quantum processors, it is required to develop new quantum tomography tools that are tailored for high-dimensional systems. In this work, we describe such a computational tool, based on recent ideas from non-convex optimization. The algorithm excels in the compressed sensing setting, where only a few data points are measured from a low-rank or highly-pure quantum state of a high-dimensional system. We show that the algorithm can practically be used in quantum tomography problems that are beyond the reach of convex solvers, and, moreover, is faster and more accurate than other state-of-the-art non-convex approaches. Crucially, we prove that, despite being a non-convex program, under mild conditions, the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the global minimum of the quantum state tomography problem; thus, it constitutes a provable quantum state tomography protocol.