Abstract

We study the determination of an unknown mixed state of a d-dimensional quantum system by means of unambiguous state discrimination. We show that optimal and nonoptimal unambiguous state discrimination can be used to reconstruct unknown states of a qubit. This result is extended to the case of a qudit by a sequence of reconstructions in two-dimensional subspaces. The total number of projections scales approximately as 2d2 for d large; this is twice as much as in the case of tomography based on mutually unbiased bases or symmetric informationally complete positive-operator-valued measures, and less than the d3 projections required by standard tomography. © 2012 American Physical Society.