Directly Estimating Mixed-State Entanglement with Bell Measurement Assistance

Entanglement plays a fundamental role in quantum physics and information processing. Here, we develop an unbiased estimator for mixed-state entanglement in the few-shot scenario and directly estimate it using random unitary evolution in a photonic system. As a supplement to traditional projective measurements, we incorporate Bell measurements on qubit-pairs, enriching the previous randomized measurement scheme, which is no-go in this task with only local unitary evolution. The scheme is scalable to n-qubits via Bell measurements on qubit-pairs. The estimator can be derived directly from a few consecutive outcomes while exhibiting greater robustness to system errors and noise compared to schemes based on shadow estimation. We find that, under a fixed measurement resource, the way with more versatile measurement settings with fewer repeats per setting is more efficient. Our protocol and demonstration advance the direct characterization of quantum states in practice.