Researchers at EQUS at U of Queensland Use Self-Guided Tomography & ”Quvigints” to Find Unknown Quantum States

(Phys.org) Physicist Dr. Markus Rambach from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) at The University of Queensland said this team has been able to find unknown quantum states more quickly and accurately, using a technique called self-guided tomography.
The team also introduced the ‘quvigint’, which is like a qubit (the quantum version of a classical bit that takes on the values ‘0’ or ‘1’) except that it takes on not two, but 20 possible values.
Dr. Rambach said high-dimensional quantum states such as quvigints were ideal for storing and sending large amounts of information securely.
However, finding unknown states becomes increasingly difficult in higher dimensions, because the same scaling that gives quantum devices their power also limits our ability to describe them.
He said this problem was akin to navigating a high-dimensional quantum treasure map. “We know where we are, and that there’s treasure, but we don’t know which way to go to get to it,” Dr. Rambach said.
Dr. Jacq Romero, also at EQUS and UQ, said self-guided tomography was unlike other methods for finding unknown quantum states.
“Self-guided tomography is efficient, accurate, robust to noise and readily scalable to high dimensions, such as quvigints,” Dr. Romero said.
“Self-guided tomography is a robust tomography method that is agnostic to the physical system, so it can be applied to other systems such as atoms or ions as well.”