From unambiguous quantum state discrimination to quantum state filtering
János A. Bergou, Ulrike Herzog, Mark S. Hillery · Fortschritte der Physik · 2003
Abstract Unambiguous discrimination among nonorthogonal but linearly independent quantum states is possible with a certain probability of success. Here, we consider a new variant of that problem. Instead of discriminating among all of the N different states, we now ask for less. We want to unambiguously assign the state to one of two complementary subsets of the set of N given non‐orthogonal quantum states, each occurring with given a priori probabilities. We refer to the special case when one subset contains only one state and the other contains the remaining N‐1 states as unambiguous quantum state filtering. We present an optimal analytical solution for the special case of N=3, and discuss the optimal strategy to unambiguously distinguish |ψ1〉 from the set {|ψ2〉,|ψ3〉}. For unambiguous filtering the subsets need not be linearly independent. We briefly discuss how to construct generalized interferometers (multiports) which provide a fully linear optical implementation of the optimal strategy.