Adaptive estimation of the density matrix in quantum homodyne tomography with noisy data

Abstract

In the framework of noisy quantum homodyne tomography with efficiency parameter $1/2 < \eta \leq 1$, we propose a novel estimator of a quantum state whose density matrix elements $\rho_{m,n}$ decrease like $Ce^{-B(m+n)^{r/ 2}}$, for fixed $C\geq 1$, $B>0$ and $0<r\leq 2$. On the contrary to previous works, we focus on the case where $r$, $C$ and $B$ are unknown. The procedure estimates the matrix coefficients by a projection method on the pattern functions, and then by soft-thresholding the estimated coefficients. We prove that under the $\mathbb{L}_2$ -loss our procedure is adaptive rate-optimal, in the sense that it achieves the same rate of conversgence as the best possible procedure relying on the knowledge of $(r,B,C)$. Finite sample behaviour of our adaptive procedure are explored through numerical experiments.