No Arabic abstract
Strategies to optimally discriminate between quantum states are critical in quantum technologies. We present an experimental demonstration of minimum error discrimination between entangled states, encoded in the polarization of pairs of photons. Although the optimal measurement involves projecting onto entangled states, we use a result of Walgate et al. to design an optical implementation employing only local polarization measurements and feed-forward, which performs at the Helstrom bound. Our scheme can achieve perfect discrimination of orthogonal states and minimum error discrimination of non-orthogonal states. Our experimental results show a definite advantage over schemes not using feed-forward.
The necessary and sufficient conditions for minimization of the generalized rate error for discriminating among $N$ pure qubit states are reformulated in terms of Bloch vectors representing the states. For the direct optimization problem an algorithmic solution to these conditions is indicated. A solution to the inverse optimization problem is given. General results are widely illustrated by particular cases of equiprobable states and $N=2,3,4$ pure qubit states given with different prior probabilities.
For the optimal success probability under minimum-error discrimination between $rgeq2$ arbitrary quantum states prepared with any a priori probabilities, we find new general analytical lower and upper bounds and specify the relations between these new general bounds and the general bounds known in the literature. We also present the example where the new general analytical bounds, lower and upper, on the optimal success probability are tighter than most of the general analytical bounds known in the literature. The new upper bound on the optimal success probability explicitly generalizes to $r>2$ the form of the Helstrom bound. For $r=2$, each of our new bounds, lower and upper, reduces to the Helstrom bound.
Quantum conversation is a way in which two parties can communicate classical information with each other using entanglement as a shared resource. We present this scheme using a multipartite entangled state after describing its generation through appropriate circuit diagrams. We make use of a discrimination scheme which allows one to perform a measurement on the system without destroying its entanglement. We later prove that this scheme is secure in a noiseless and a lossless quantum channel.
In the task of discriminating between nonorthogonal quantum states from multiple copies, the key parameters are the error probability and the resources (number of copies) used. Previous studies have considered the task of minimizing the average error probability for fixed resources. Here we introduce a new state discrimination task: minimizing the average resources for a fixed admissible error probability. We show that this new task is not performed optimally by previously known strategies, and derive and experimentally test a detection scheme that performs better.
We derive general discrimination of quantum states chosen from a certain set, given initial $M$ copies of each state, and obtain the matrix inequality, which describe the bound between the maximum probability of correctly determining and that of error. The former works are special cases of our results.