No Arabic abstract
We introduce, for each state of a bosonic quantum field, its quadrature coherence scale (QCS), a measure of the range of its quadrature coherences. Under coupling to a thermal bath, the purity and QCS are shown to decrease on a time scale inversely proportional to the QCS squared. The states most fragile to decoherence are therefore those with quadrature coherences far from the diagonal. We further show a large QCS is difficult to measure since it induces small scale variations in the states Wigner function. These two observations imply a large QCS constitutes a mark of macroscopic coherence. Finally, we link the QCS to optical classicality: optical classical states have a small QCS and a large QCS implies strong optical nonclassicality.
A multi-slit interference experiment, with which-way detectors, in the presence of environment induced decoherence, is theoretically analyzed. The effect of environment is modeled via a coupling to a bath of harmonic oscillators. Through an exact analysis, an expression for $mathcal{C}$, a recently introduced measure of coherence, of the particle at the detecting screen is obtained as a function of the parameters of the environment. It is argued that the effect of decoherence can be quantified using the measured coherence value which lies between zero and one. For the specific case of two slits, it is shown that the decoherence time can be obtained from the measured value of the coherence, $mathcal{C}$, thus providing a novel way to quantify the effect of decoherence via direct measurement of quantum coherence. This would be of significant value in many current studies that seek to exploit quantum superpositions for quantum information applications and scalable quantum computation.
The total correlations in a bipartite quantum system are measured by the quantum mutual information $mathcal{I}$, which consists of quantum discord and classical correlation. However, recent results in quantum information shows that coherence, which is a part of total correlation, is more general and more fundamental than discord. The role of coherence in quantum resource theories is worthwhile to investigate. We first study the relation between quantum discord and coherence by reducing the difference between them. And then, we consider the dynamics of quantum discord, classical correlations and quantum coherence under incoherent quantum channels. We discover that coherence indicate the behavior of quantum discord (classical correlation) for times $t<bar t$, and indicate the decoherence of classical correlation (quantum discord) for times $t>bar t$. What is more, the coherence frozen and decay indicate the quantum discord and classical correlation frozen and decay respectively.
We introduce a geometric quantification of quantum coherence in single-mode Gaussian states and we investigate the behavior of distance measures as functions of different physical parameters. In the case of squeezed thermal states, we observe that re-quantization yields an effect of noise-enhanced quantum coherence for increasing thermal photon number.
The quantum nature of the state of a bosonic quantum field manifests itself in its entanglement, coherence, or optical nonclassicality which are each known to be resources for quantum computing or metrology. We provide quantitative and computable bounds relating entanglement measures with optical nonclassicality measures. These bounds imply that strongly entangled states must necessarily be strongly optically nonclassical. As an application, we infer strong bounds on the entanglement that can be produced with an optically nonclassical state impinging on a beam splitter. For Gaussian states, we analyze the link between the logarithmic negativity and a specific nonclassicality witness called quadrature coherence scale.
In many quantum information processing applications, it is important to be able to transfer a quantum state from one location to another - even within a local device. Typical approaches to implement the quantum state transfer rely on unitary evolutions or measurement feedforward operations. However, these existing schemes require accurate pulse operations and/or precise timing controls. Here, we propose a one-way transfer of the quantum state with near unit efficiency using dissipation from a tailored environment. After preparing an initial state, the transfer can be implemented without external time dependent operations. Moreover, our scheme is irreversible due to the non-unitary evolution, and so the transferred state remains in the same site once the system reaches the steady state. This is in stark contrast to the unitary state transfer where the quantum states continue to oscillate between different sites. Our novel quantum state transfer via the dissipation paves the way towards robust and practical quantum control.