Quantum pure-state identification

Abstract

We address a problem of identifying a given pure state with one of two reference pure states, when no classical knowledge on the reference states is given, but a certain number of copies of them are available. We assume the input state is guaranteed to be either one of the two reference states. This problem, which we call quantum pure state identification, is a natural generalization of the standard state discrimination problem. The two reference states are assumed to be independently distributed in a unitary invariant way in the whole state space. We give a complete solution for the averaged maximal success probability of this problem for an arbitrary number of copies of the reference states in general dimension. It is explicitly shown that the obtained mean identification probability approaches the mean discrimination probability as the number of the reference copies goes to infinity.