Reconstructing Real-Valued Quantum States

Abstract: Quantum tomography is a crucial tool for characterizing quantum states and devices and estimating nonlinear properties of the systems. Performing full quantum state tomography (FQST) on an $N_\mathrm{q}$ qubit system requires an exponentially increasing overhead with $O(3^{N_\mathrm{q}})$ distinct Pauli measurement settings to resolve all complex phases and reconstruct the density matrix. However, many appealing applications of quantum computing, such as quantum linear system algorithms, require only real-valued amplitudes. Here we introduce a novel readout method for real-valued quantum states that reduces measurement settings required for state vector reconstruction to $O(N_\mathrm{q})$, while the post-processing cost remains exponential. This approach offers a substantial speedup over conventional tomography. We experimentally validate our method up to 10~qubits on the latest available IBM quantum processor and demonstrate that it accurately extracts key properties such as entanglement and magic. Our method also outperforms the standard SWAP test for state overlap estimation. This calculation resembles a numerical integration in certain cases and can be applied to extract nonlinear properties, which are important in application fields.