Well-posedness and instability of free electron quantum tomography

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Oberender, Florian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Oberender, Florian
author_facet Oberender, Florian
contents Recent advancements in photon induced near-field electron microscopy (PINEM) enable the preparation, coherent manipulation and characterization of free-electron quantum states. The available measurement consists of electron energy spectrograms and the goal is the reconstruction of a density matrix representing the quantum state. This requires the solution of a constrained linear inverse problem, where a positive semi-definite trace-class operator is reconstructed given its diagonal in different bases. We show the well-posedness of this problem by exploiting the regularizing effect of the positive semi-definiteness constraint. Unusually, well-posedness in this case does not imply any stability estimates. We show that no global stability estimates exist and any estimator converges arbitrarily slowly. We also provide further bounds on the instability generally complementing the analysis done in [arXiv:1907.03438]. Furthermore, we derive a decomposition of the discretized operator which allows us to study its injectivity and stability properties. It also leads to a faster implementation which we exploit in numerical experiments validating the instability estimates and the stability of the constrained problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Well-posedness and instability of free electron quantum tomography
Oberender, Florian
Numerical Analysis
65J20, 81P18, 65K10, 47A52
Recent advancements in photon induced near-field electron microscopy (PINEM) enable the preparation, coherent manipulation and characterization of free-electron quantum states. The available measurement consists of electron energy spectrograms and the goal is the reconstruction of a density matrix representing the quantum state. This requires the solution of a constrained linear inverse problem, where a positive semi-definite trace-class operator is reconstructed given its diagonal in different bases. We show the well-posedness of this problem by exploiting the regularizing effect of the positive semi-definiteness constraint. Unusually, well-posedness in this case does not imply any stability estimates. We show that no global stability estimates exist and any estimator converges arbitrarily slowly. We also provide further bounds on the instability generally complementing the analysis done in [arXiv:1907.03438]. Furthermore, we derive a decomposition of the discretized operator which allows us to study its injectivity and stability properties. It also leads to a faster implementation which we exploit in numerical experiments validating the instability estimates and the stability of the constrained problem.
title Well-posedness and instability of free electron quantum tomography
topic Numerical Analysis
65J20, 81P18, 65K10, 47A52
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15058