Identifying an experimental two-state Hamiltonian to arbitrary accuracy

Abstract

Precision control of a quantum system requires accurate determination of the effective system Hamiltonian. We develop a method for estimating the Hamiltonian parameters for some unknown two-state system and providing uncertainty bounds on these parameters. This method requires only one measurement basis and the ability to initialize the system in some arbitrary state which is not an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian in question. The scaling of the uncertainty is studied for large numbers of measurements and found to be proportional to the reciprocal of the square root of the number of measurements. © 2005 The American Physical Society.