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We report a proof-of-principle experiment demonstrating that appropriately chosen set of Hermite-Gaussian modes constitutes a Schmidt decomposition for transverse momentum states of biphotons generated in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We experimentally realize projective measurements in the Schmidt basis and observe correlations between appropriate pairs of modes. We perform tomographical state reconstruction in the Schmidt basis, by direct measurement of single-photon density matrix eigenvalues.

We report an experimental realization of an adaptive quantum state tomography protocol. Our method takes advantage of a Bayesian approach to statistical inference and is naturally tailored for adaptive strategies. For pure states we observe close to 1/N scaling of infidelity with overall number of registered events, while best non-adaptive protocols allow for 1/ √ N scaling only. Experiments are performed for polarization qubits, but the approach is readily adapted to any dimension.

Quantum tomography is currently ubiquitous for testing any implementation of a quantum information processing device. Various sophisticated procedures for state and process reconstruction from measured data are well developed and benefit from precise knowledge of the model describing state preparation and the measurement apparatus. However, physical models suffer from intrinsic limitations as actual measurement operators and trial states cannot be known precisely. This scenario inevitably leads to state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) errors degrading reconstruction performance. Here we develop and experimentally implement a machine learning based protocol reducing SPAM errors. We trained a supervised neural network to filter the experimental data and hence uncovered salient patterns that characterize the measurement probabilities for the original state and the ideal experimental apparatus free from SPAM errors. We compared the neural network state reconstruction protocol with a protocol treating SPAM errors by process tomography, as well as to a SPAM-agnostic protocol with idealized measurements. The average reconstruction fidelity is shown to be enhanced by 10% and 27%, respectively. The presented methods apply to the vast range of quantum experiments which rely on tomography.arXiv:1904.05902v2 [quant-ph]