Tight Lower Bounds for State Tomography with Limited Entanglement

Abstract

We study state tomography when each measurement acts on at most $k$ fresh copies and no quantum memory is retained between blocks. We prove a lower bound matching the upper bound in [arXiv:2510.07788]. Thus the copy complexity of estimating an arbitrary $d$-dimensional state to trace distance $\epsilon$ is, up to absolute constant factors, $\max\{d^3/(\sqrt{k}\epsilon^2),d^2/\epsilon^2\}$ for every $k$ and all sufficiently small $\epsilon$. This removes the earlier restriction that $k$ be small as a function of the accuracy. The lower bound applies to arbitrary measurements within each block and adaptive choices between blocks. The lower bound already applies in a small neighborhood of any state whose smallest eigenvalue is of order $1/d$, even when the center is known. The main ingredient is a uniform Fisher information bound for one measurement block that depends only on the smallest eigenvalue of the state. The proof avoids the perturbative expansion responsible for the restriction in [arXiv:2402.16353]. Fano's inequality for metric balls and a log-Sobolev comparison between mutual and Fisher information then reduce the adaptive protocol to this block bound [arXiv:1607.00550, arXiv:1902.08582].