Practical Quantum State Tomography for Gibbs states

Abstract: Quantum state tomography is an essential tool for the characterization and verification of quantum states. However, as it cannot be directly applied to systems with more than a few qubits, efficient tomography of larger states on mid-sized quantum devices remains an important challenge in quantum computing. We develop a tomography approach that requires moderate computational and quantum resources for the tomography of states that can be approximated by Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians. The proposed method, Hamiltonian Learning Tomography, uses a Hamiltonian learning algorithm to get a parametrized ansatz for the Gibbs Hamiltonian, and optimizes it with respect to the results of local measurements. We demonstrate the utility of this method with a high fidelity reconstruction of the density matrix of 4 to 10 qubits in a Gibbs state of the transverse-field Ising model, in numerical simulations as well as in experiments on IBM Quantum superconducting devices accessed via the cloud. Code implementation of the our method is freely available as an open source software in Python.