Pretty simple bounds on quantum state discrimination
Ashley Montanaro · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2019
We show that the quantum measurement known as the pretty good measurement can be used to identify an unknown quantum state picked from any set of $n$ mixed states that have pairwise fidelities upper-bounded by a constant below 1, given $O(\log n)$ copies of the unknown state, with high success probability in the worst case. If the unknown state is promised to be pure, there is an explicit measurement strategy which solves this worst-case quantum state discrimination problem with $\widetilde{O}(\|G\|)$ copies, where $G$ is the Gram matrix of the states.