Quartic Certificates for Pure-State Tomography with Pauli Measurements

Abstract:Full Pauli-basis tomography of an arbitrary $n$-qubit state uses the expectation values of all nonidentity Pauli observables. For multiqubit systems, prior knowledge that the state is pure allows some of these observables to be omitted while retaining uniqueness. We study two resulting notions of uniqueness: whether every pure state is uniquely determined among pure states (UDP), and whether every pure state is uniquely determined among all states, including mixed states (UDA). We derive quartic uniqueness certificates from the fourth elementary symmetric polynomial of operators in the real span of the omitted Pauli observables. An exact quartic identity shows that, for $n$-qubit systems with $n\geq 3$, every pure state is UDA whenever the omitted Pauli observables contain no four distinct operators that commute pairwise and multiply to $\pm I$. For three qubits, this condition is also necessary for UDP, yielding an exact characterization of both UDP and UDA. We further prove that UDP and UDA coincide for any number of qubits whenever the omitted Pauli observables commute pairwise. These results provide directly checkable structural criteria for certifying pure-state tomography from restricted Pauli measurements.

arXiv:2610.12320 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2610.12320v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12320 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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