  The characterization of the dynamics of quantum systems is a task of both
fundamental and practical importance. A general class of methods which have
been developed in quantum information theory to accomplish this task is known
as quantum process tomography (QPT). In an earlier paper [M. Mohseni and D. A.
Lidar, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 170501 (2006)] we presented a new algorithm for
Direct Characterization of Quantum Dynamics (DCQD) of two-level quantum
systems. Here we provide a generalization by developing a theory for direct and
complete characterization of the dynamics of arbitrary quantum systems. In
contrast to other QPT schemes, DCQD relies on quantum error-detection
techniques and does not require any quantum state tomography. We demonstrate
that for the full characterization of the dynamics of n d-level quantum systems
(with d a power of a prime), the minimal number of required experimental
configurations is reduced quadratically from d^{4n} in separable QPT schemes to
d^{2n} in DCQD.
