Demonstrating Efficient and Robust Bosonic State Reconstruction via Optimized Excitation Counting

Quantum state reconstruction is an essential element in quantum information processing. However, efficient and reliable reconstruction of nontrivial quantum states in the presence of hardware imperfections can be challenging. This task is particularly demanding for high-dimensional states encoded in continuous-variable (CV) systems, where a large number of grid-based measurements are often used to adequately sample relevant regions of phase space. In this work, we introduce an efficient and robust technique of optimized reconstruction with excitation-number sampling (ORENS) based on the idea of the generalized Q function. We use a standard bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) setup to experimentally demonstrate effective state reconstruction using the theoretically minimum number of measurements. Our investigation highlights that ORENS is naturally free of parasitic system dynamics and resilient to decoherence effects in the hardware, enabling it to outperform the conventional reconstruction techniques in cQED such as Wigner tomography. Finally, ORENS relies only on the ability to accurately measure the excitation number of a given CV state, making it a versatile and accessible tool for a wide range of CV platforms and readily scalable to multimode systems. Thus, our work provides a crucial and valuable primitive for practical quantum information processing using bosonic modes.