Collective versus local measurements in a qubit mixed-state estimation -: art. no. 010304

We discuss the problem of estimating a qubit mixed state. We give the optimal estimation that can be inferred from any given set of measurements. For collective measurements and for a large number N of copies, we show that the error in the estimation varies as 1/N. For local measurements, we focus on the simpler case of states lying on the equatorial plane of the Bloch sphere. We show that the error using plain tomography varies as 1/N-1/4, while our approach leads to an error proportional to 1/N-3/4.