Local solutions of Maximum Likelihood Estimation in Quantum State Tomography

Understand

Maximum likelihood estimation is one of the most used methods in quantum state tomography, where the aim is to reconstruct the density matrix of a physical system from measurement results.

• One strategy to deal with positivity and unit trace constraints is to parameterize the matrix to be reconstructed in order to ensure that it is physical.
• In this case, the negative log-likelihood function in terms of the parameters, may have several local minima.
• In various papers in the field, a source of errors in this process has been associated to the possibility that most of these local minima are not global, so that optimization methods could be trapped in the wrong minimum, leading to a wrong density matrix.