Complete analysis for three-qubit mixed-state discrimination

Abstract

In this article, by treating minimum error state discrimination as a complementarity problem, we obtain the geometric optimality conditions. These can be used as the necessary and sufficient conditions to determine whether every optimal measurement operator can be nonzero. Using these conditions and an inductive approach, we demonstrate a geometric method and the intrinsic polytope for N-qubit mixed-state discrimination. When the intrinsic polytope becomes a point, a line segment, or a triangle, the guessing probability, the necessary and sufficient condition for the exact solution, and the optimal measurement are analytically obtained. We apply this result to the problem of discrimination to arbitrary three-qubit mixed states with given a priori probabilities and obtain the complete analytic solution to the guessing probability and optimal measurement.