Quantum Overlapping Tomography

It is now experimentally possible to entangle thousands of qubits, and efficiently measure each qubit in parallel in a distinct basis. To fully characterize an unknown entangled state of n qubits, one requires an exponential number of measurements in n, which is experimentally unfeasible even for modest system sizes. By leveraging (i) that single-qubit measurements can be made in parallel, and (ii) the theory of perfect hash families, we show that all k-qubit reduced density matrices of an n qubit state can be determined with at most e(O(k)) log(2) (n) rounds of parallel measurements. We provide concrete measurement protocols which realize this bound. As an example, we argue that with near-term experiments, every two-point correlator in a system of 1024 qubits could be measured and completely characterized in a few days. This corresponds to determining nearly 4.5 million correlators.