Practical variational tomography for critical one-dimensional systems

We improve upon a recently introduced efficient quantum state reconstruction procedure targeted to states well approximated by the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), e.g., ground states of critical models. We show how to numerically select a subset of experimentally accessible measurements which maximize information extraction about renormalized particles, thus dramatically reducing the required number of physical measurements. We numerically estimate the number of measurements required to characterize the ground state of the critical one-dimensional Ising (resp. XX) model and find that MERA tomography on 16-qubit (resp. 24-qubit) systems requires the same experimental effort as brute-force tomography on 8 qubits. We derive a bound computable from experimental data which certifies the distance between the experimental and reconstructed states.