Reconstructing the relaxation dynamics induced by an unknown heat bath

Abstract

In quantum state tomography, one potential source of error is uncontrolled contact of the system with a heat bath whose detailed properties are not known, and whose impact on the system moreover varies between different runs of the experiment. Precisely these variations provide a handle for reconstructing the system's effective relaxation dynamics. I propose a pertinent estimation scheme which is based on a steepest-descent ansatz and maximum likelihood. After reconstructing the relaxation dynamics, the original quantum state of the system can be constrained to a curve in state space.

8 pages, 1 figure; v3: final version to appear in Phys. Lett. A

References in corpus (3)

• Quantum estimation via minimum Kullback entropy principle
• Inferring the Gibbs state of a small quantum system
• Assessing thermalization and estimating the Hamiltonian with output data only