Simulating all quantum measurements using only projective measurements and postselection
Michał Oszmaniec, Filip B. Maciejewski, Zbigniew Puchała · Physical Review A · 2019
We report an alternative scheme for implementing generalized quantum measurements that does not require the usage of an auxiliary system. Our method utilizes solely (a) classical randomness and postprocessing, (b) projective measurements on a relevant quantum system, and (c) postselection on nonobserving certain outcomes. The scheme implements arbitrary quantum measurement in dimension $d$ with the optimal success probability $1/d$. We apply our results to bound the relative power of projective and generalized measurements for unambiguous state discrimination. Finally, we test our scheme experimentally on an IBM quantum processor. Interestingly, due to noise involved in the implementation of entangling gates, the quality with which our scheme implements generalized qubit measurements outperforms the standard construction using an auxiliary system.