Experimental realization of Hamiltonian tomography by quantum quenches

The parameter estimation of the Hamiltonian of an unknown quantum system is essential in quantum information processing. However, the general methods based on quantum state tomography and process tomography are resource demanding and challenging in large quantum systems. On the other hand, if the interaction form of a system is known, one can adopt the quantum quench protocol to reconstruct the generic many-body Hamiltonian with local interactions, requiring significantly lower complexity and measurement cost compared to the general tomography technique. Here we report an experimental demonstration of the quench method to determine the scalar coupling constants in a three-spin chain. In the experiments, we demonstrate that how the quality of the estimation is affected by the duration of the quench and the number of input states. Our results show that the quantum quench protocol is a promising strategy to implement Hamiltonian estimation for many-body systems, especially when the cost of measurement is crucial in practical cases.