Optimal choice of state tomography quorum formed by projection operators

Abstract

A minimal set of measurement operators for quantum state tomography has in the nondegenerate case ideally eigenbases which are mutually unbiased. This is different for the degenerate case. Here we consider the situation where the measurement operators are projections on individual pure quantum states. This corresponds to maximal degeneracy. We present numerically optimized sets of projectors and find that they significantly outperform those which are taken from a set of mutually unbiased bases.