Ability of entanglement and purity to help to detect systematic experimental errors

Abstract

Measurements are central in all quantitative sciences, and a fundamental challenge is to make observations without systematic measurement errors. This holds in particular for quantum information processing, where other error sources, such as noise and decoherence, are unavoidable. Consequently, methods for detecting systematic errors have been developed, but the required quantum state properties are yet unexplored. We theoretically develop a direct and efficient method to detect systematic errors in quantum experiments and demonstrate it experimentally using quantum state tomography of photon pairs emitted from a semiconductor quantum dot. Our method can be scaled to multi-qubit systems, and we find that entanglement and quantum states with high purity can help identify systematic errors.