Accelerated method for optimization over density matrices in quantum state estimation

In this paper, a class of minimization problems over density matrices arising in the quantum state estimation is investigated. By making use of the Nesterov’s accelerated strategies, we introduce a modified augmented Lagrangian method to solve it, where the subproblem is tackled by the projected Barzilai–Borwein method with nonmonotone line search. Compared with the existing projected gradient method, several numerical examples are tested to show that the proposed method is efficient and promising.