Estimation of qubit states in a factorizing basis

The optimal estimation of a quantum mechanical 2-state system (qubit) - with N identically prepared qubits available - is obtained by measuring all qubits simultaneously in an entangled basis. We report the experimental estimation of qubits using a succession of N measurements on individual qubits where the measurement basis is changed during the estimation procedure conditioned on the outcome of previous measurements (self-learning estimation). The performance of this adaptive algorithm is compared with other algorithms using measurements in a factorizing basis.