Efficiency of photonic state tomography affected by fiber attenuation

In this article, we investigate the efficiency of photonic state tomography in the presence of fiber attenuation. The theoretical formalism of the photon loss is provided by implementing methods from the theory of open quantum systems. The quantum state is reconstructed from photon counts obtained for symmetric informationally complete POVMs. The number of photons that reach the detectors is numerically modeled by the binomial distribution, which describes the loss of light caused by the medium. This approach allows us to study the quality of state tomography versus the length of the fiber. In particular, we focus on entangled qubits and qutrits, which are sent through fibers of different lengths. The amount of entanglement detected by the measurement scheme is quantified and presented on graphs. The results demonstrate how the quality of photonic tomography depends on the distance between the source and the receiver