Paper detail

Evolution prediction from tomography

Quantum process tomography provides a means of measuring the evolution operator for a system at a fixed measurement time $t$. The problem of using that tomographic snapshot to predict the evolution operator at other times is generally ill-posed since there are, in general, infinitely many distinct and compatible solutions. We describe the prediction, in some ``maximal ignorance&#39;&#39; sense, of the evolution of a quantum system based on knowledge only of the evolution operator for finitely many times $0<τ_{1}<\dots<τ_{M}$ with $M\geq 1$. To resolve the ill-posedness problem, we construct this prediction as the result of an average over some unknown (and unknowable) variables. The resulting prediction provides a description of the observer&#39;s state of knowledge of the system&#39;s evolution at times away from the measurement times. Even if the original evolution is unitary, the predicted evolution is described by a non-unitary, completely positive map.