Direct reconstruction of the quantum density matrix elements with classical shadow tomography

Abstract

We introduce a direct estimation framework for reconstructing multiple density matrix elements of an unknown quantum state using classical shadow tomography. Traditional direct measurement protocols (DMPs), while effective for individual elements, suffer from poor scalability due to post-selection losses and the need for element-specific measurement configurations. In contrast, our method, DMP-ST, leverages random Clifford or biased mutually unbiased basis measurements to enable global estimation: a single dataset suffices to estimate arbitrary off-diagonal entries with high accuracy. We prove that estimating \(K\) off-diagonal matrix elements up to additive error \(\epsilon\) requires only \(\mathcal{O}(\log K/\epsilon^2)\) samples, achieving exponential improvement over conventional DMPs. The number of required measurement configurations can also be exponentially reduced for large K. When extended to full state tomography, DMP-ST attains trace distance error \(\le \epsilon\) with sample complexity \(\mathcal{O}(d^3 \log d/\epsilon^2)\), which is closed to the optimal scaling for single-copy measurements. Moreover, biased MUB measurements reduce sample complexity by a constant factor than random Clifford measurements. This work provides both theoretical guarantees and explicit protocols for efficient, entrywise quantum state reconstruction. It significantly advances the practicality of direct tomography, especially for high-dimensional systems and near-term quantum platforms.