Local solutions of maximum likelihood estimation in quantum state tomography

Maximum likelihood estimation is one of the most used methods in quantum state tomography, where the aim is to find the best density matrix for the description of a physical system. Results of measurements on the system should match the expected values produced by the density matrix. In some cases however, if the matrix is parameterized to ensure positivity and unit trace, the negative log-likelihood function may have several local minima. In several papers in the field, authors associate a source of errors to the possibility that most of these local minima are not global, so that optimization methods can be trapped in the wrong minimum, leading to a wrong density matrix. Here we show that, for convex negative log-likelihood functions, all local minima are global. We also show that a practical source of errors is in fact the use of optimization methods that do not have global convergence property or present numerical instabilities. The clarification of this point has important repercussion on quantum information operations that use quantum state tomography.