No Arabic abstract
We show that the entropy of a message can be tested in a device-independent way. Specifically, we consider a prepare-and-measure scenario with classical or quantum communication, and develop two different methods for placing lower bounds on the communication entropy, given observable data. The first method is based on the framework of causal inference networks. The second technique, based on convex optimization, shows that quantum communication provides an advantage over classical, in the sense of requiring a lower entropy to reproduce given data. These ideas may serve as a basis for novel applications in device-independent quantum information processing.
In this paper, we report an experiment about the device-independent tests of classical and quantum entropy based on a recent proposal [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 110501 (2015)], in which the states are encoded on the polarization of a biphoton system and measured by the state tomography technology. We also theoretically obtained the minimal quantum entropy for three widely used linear dimension witnesses. The experimental results agree well with the theoretical analysis, demonstrating that lower entropy is needed in quantum systems than that in classical systems under given values of the dimension witness.
Quantum tomography is currently the mainly employed method to assess the information of a system and therefore plays a fundamental role when trying to characterize the action of a particular channel. Nonetheless, quantum tomography requires the trust that the devices used in the laboratory perform state generation and measurements correctly. This work is based on the theoretical framework for the device-independent inference of quantum channels that was recently developed and experimentally implemented with superconducting qubits in [DallArno, Buscemi, Vedral, arXiv:1805.01159] and [DallArno, Brandsen, Buscemi, PRSA 473, 20160721 (2017)]. Here, we present a complete experimental test on a photonic setup of two device-independent quantum channels falsification and characterization protocols to analyze, validate, and enhance the results obtained by conventional quantum process tomography. This framework has fundamental implications in quantum information processing and may also lead to the development of new methods removing the assumptions typically taken for granted in all the previous protocols.
In contrast with classical physics, in quantum physics some sets of measurements are incompatible in the sense that they can not be performed simultaneously. Among other applications, incompatibility allows for contextuality and Bell nonlocality. This makes of crucial importance developing tools for certifying whether a set of measurements posses a certain structure of incompatibility. Here we show that, for quantum or nonsignaling models, if the measurements employed in a Bell test satisfy a given type of compatibility, then the amount of violation of some specific Bell inequalities become limited. Then, we show that correlations arising from local measurements on two-qubit states violate these limits, which rules out in a device-independent way such structures of incompatibility. In particular, we prove that quantum correlations allow for a device-independent demonstration of genuine triplewise incompatibility. Finally, we translate these results into a semi-device-independent Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-steering scenario.
Multiparty quantum cryptography based on distributed entanglement will find its natural application in the upcoming quantum networks. The security of many multipartite device-independent (DI) protocols, such as DI conference key agreement, relies on bounding the von Neumann entropy of the parties outcomes conditioned on the eavesdroppers information, given the violation of a multipartite Bell inequality. We consider three parties testing the Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko (MABK) inequality and certify the privacy of their outcomes by bounding the conditional entropy of a single partys outcome and the joint conditional entropy of two parties outcomes. From the former bound, we show that genuine multipartite entanglement is necessary to certify the privacy of a partys outcome, while the latter significantly improve previous results. We obtain the entropy bounds thanks to two general results of independent interest. The first one drastically simplifies the quantum setup of an $N$-partite Bell scenario. The second one provides an upper bound on the violation of the MABK inequality by an arbitrary $N$-qubit state, as a function of the states parameters.
Among certification techniques, those based on the violation of Bell inequalities are appealing because they do not require assumptions on the underlying Hilbert space dimension and on the accuracy of calibration methods. Such device-independent techniques have been proposed to certify the quality of entangled states, unitary operations, projective measurements following von Neumanns model and rank-one positive-operator-valued measures (POVM). Here, we show that they can be extended to the characterization of quantum instruments with post-measurement states that are not fully determined by the Kraus operators but also depend on input states. We provide concrete certification recipes that are robust to noise.