Quantum trajectories for time-binned data and their closeness to fully conditioned quantum trajectories

Abstract

Quantum trajectories are dynamical equations for quantum states conditioned on the results of a time-continuous measurement, such as a continuous-in-time current ${\vec{y}}_t$. Recently, there has been renewed interest in finite-interval dynamical maps for quantum trajectories, where the measurement record is available only over intervals of duration $\Delta t$. Guilmin \emph{et al.}\ (unpublished) derived such a map for the experimentally relevant case in which only a coarse-grained current (time-binned), denoted by $I_t$, is available. Remarkably, this coarse-grained record $I_t$ still yields a conditioned state, termed the \emph{robinet} state, whose impurity scales as small as $(\Delta t{)}^3$. We show, however, that the \emph{typical} trace distance between the robinet state and the fully conditioned state (obtained from the complete measurement record) scales as $(\Delta t{)}^{3/2}$. We then introduce a higher-order finite-interval dynamical map, the ``nearly-exact'' map, which requires only one additional real statistic, ${\varphi }_t$, from each interval. We analytically show that the resulting conditioned state is much closer to the fully conditioned state, with a distance scaling as $(\Delta t{)}^2$. We further numerically verify the distance scalings, measured relative to highly accurate approximations of the fully conditioned state, for the robinet map, our nearly-exact map, the lowest-order approximate Itô map, and two existing higher-order maps. Our results show that, for generic systems, whenever ${\varphi }_t$ can be extracted experimentally alongside $I_t$, the nearly exact map provides the most accurate state estimate among the finite-interval maps considered.

16 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables