Adaptive Reconstruction of Bosonic Quantum States

  1. Vasilisa Usova,
  2. Phila Rembold,
  3. Ian Yang,
  4. Marco Rossignolo,
  5. Simone Montangero,
  6. Samuele Tosatto,
  7. and Gerhard Kirchmair
Bosonic quantum systems provide a hardware-efficient platform for quantum information processing but remain challenging to characterise due to their large Hilbert space and the high
measurement cost of state tomography. Existing approaches estimate the fidelity with respect to a single target state, making them unsuitable for applications in which physically equivalent states differ by phase space translations, rotations, or other transformations. Here, we introduce an adaptive reconstruction technique that estimates the fidelity with respect to a family of bosonic states while reconstructing the underlying Wigner function from a small number of measurements. The method combines a physics-informed parametric model with Bayesian inference, bootstrap, and active learning to iteratively select the most informative phase space sampling points. We implement the approach on a circuit quantum electrodynamics platform and benchmark it on Schrödinger cat states with amplitudes α∈[1,3]. The reconstruction yields reproducible fidelity estimates within a few minutes, remains robust to substantial displacements and rotations in phase space despite using a mismatched prior, and is sensitive to subtle state imperfections. We further compare the adaptive strategy with existing Wigner function sampling protocols experimentally, demonstrating the advantage of adaptive sampling for measurement-efficient fidelity estimation with respect to a family of cat states. Finally, we incorporate the reconstructed fidelity into the figure of merit used in a proof-of-principle closed-loop quantum optimal control experiment, demonstrating the applicability of the method to autonomous optimisation of bosonic quantum states.

Hot Schrödinger Cat States

  1. Ian Yang,
  2. Thomas Agrenius,
  3. Vasilisa Usova,
  4. Oriol Romero-Isart,
  5. and Gerhard Kirchmair
The observation of quantum phenomena often necessitates sufficiently pure states, a requirement that can be challenging to achieve. In this study, our goal is to prepare a non-classical
state originating from a mixed state, utilizing dynamics that preserve the initial low purity of the state. We generate a quantum superposition of displaced thermal states within a microwave cavity using only unitary interactions with a transmon qubit. We measure the Wigner functions of these „hot“ Schrödinger cat states for an initial purity as low as 0.06. This corresponds to a cavity mode temperature of up to 1.8 Kelvin, sixty times hotter than the cavity’s physical environment. Our realization of highly mixed quantum superposition states could be implemented with other continuous-variable systems e.g. nanomechanical oscillators, for which ground-state cooling remains challenging.