No Arabic abstract
Transmission and storage of quantum information are the fundamental building blocks for large-scale quantum communication networks. Reliable certification of quantum communication channels and quantum memories requires the estimation of their capacities to transmit and store quantum information. This problem is challenging for continuous variable systems, such as the radiation field, for which a complete characterization of processes via quantum tomography is practically unfeasible. Here we develop protocols for detecting lower bounds to the quantum capacity of continuous variable communication channels and memories. Our protocols work in the general scenario where the devices are used a finite number of times, can exhibit correlations across multiple uses, and can be under the control of an adversary. Our protocols are experimentally friendly and can be implemented using Gaussian input states (single-mode squeezed or coherent) and Gaussian quantum measurements (homodyne or heterodyne). These schemes can be used to certify the transmission and storage of continuous variable quantum information, and to detect communication paths in quantum networks.
The rates at which classical and quantum information can be simultaneously transmitted from two spatially separated senders to a single receiver over an arbitrary quantum channel are characterized. Two main results are proved in detail. The first describes the region of rates at which one sender can send classical information while the other sends quantum information. The second describes those rates at which both senders can send quantum information. For each of these situations, an example of a channel is given for which the associated region admits a single-letter description. This is the authors Ph.D. dissertation, submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in March, 2005. It represents an expanded version of the paper quant-ph/0501045, containing a number of tutorial chapters which may be of independent interest for those learning about quantum Shannon theory.
We investigate the performance of several continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocols in the presence of fading channels. These are lossy channels whose transmissivity changes according to a probability distribution. This is typical in communication scenarios where remote parties are connected by free-space links subject to atmospheric turbulence. In this work, we assume the worst-case scenario where an eavesdropper has full control of a fast fading process, so that she chooses the instantaneous transmissivity of a channel, while the remote parties can only detect the mean statistical process. In our study, we consider coherent-state protocols run in various configurations, including the one-way switching protocol in reverse reconciliation, the measurement-device-independent protocol in the symmetric configuration and a three-party measurement-device-independent network. We show that, regardless of the advantage given to the eavesdropper (full control of fading), these protocols can still achieve high rates.
We investigate the entanglement dynamics of continuous-variable quantum channels in terms of an entangled squeezed state of two cavity fields in a general non-Markovian environment. Using the Feynman-Vernon influence functional theory in the coherent-state representation, we derive an exact master equation with time-dependent coefficients reflecting the non-Markovian influence of the environment. The influence of environments with different spectral densities, e.g., Ohmic, sub-Ohmic, and super-Ohmic, is numerically studied. The non-Markovian process shows its remarkable influences on the entanglement dynamics due to the sensitive time-dependence of the dissipation and noise functions within the typical time scale of the environment. The Ohmic environment shows a weak dissipation-noise effect on the entanglement dynamics, while the sub-Ohmic and super-Ohmic environments induce much more severe noise. In particular, the memory of the system interacting with the environment contributes a strong decoherence effect to the entanglement dynamics in the super-Ohmic case.
The positivity and nonadditivity of the one-letter quantum capacity (maximum coherent information) $Q^{(1)}$ is studied for two simple examples of complementary quantum channel pairs $(B,C)$. They are produced by a process, we call it gluing, for combining two or more channels to form a composite. (We discuss various other forms of gluing, some of which may be of interest for applications outside those considered in this paper.) An amplitude-damping qubit channel with damping probability $0leq p leq 1$ glued to a perfect channel is an example of what we call a generalized erasure channel characterized by an erasure probability $lambda$ along with $p$. A second example, using a phase-damping rather than amplitude-damping qubit channel, results in the dephrasure channel of Ledtizky et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 160501 (2018)]. In both cases we find the global maximum and minimum of the entropy bias or coherent information, which determine $Q^{(1)}(B_g)$ and $Q^{(1)}(C_g)$, respectively, and the ranges in the $(p,lambda)$ parameter space where these capacities are positive or zero, confirming previous results for the dephrasure channel. The nonadditivity of $Q^{(1)}(B_g)$ for two channels in parallel occurs in a well defined region of the $(p,lambda)$ plane for the amplitude-damping case, whereas for the dephrasure case we extend previous results to additional values of $p$ and $lambda$ at which nonadditivity occurs. For both cases, $Q^{(1)}(C_g)$ shows a peculiar behavior: When $p=0$, $C_g$ is an erasure channel with erasure probability $1-lambda$, so $Q^{(1)}(C_g)$ is zero for $lambda leq 1/2$. However, for any $p>0$, no matter how small, $Q^{(1)}(C_g)$ is positive, though it may be extremely small, for all $lambda >0$. Despite the simplicity of these models we still lack an intuitive understanding of the nonadditivity of $Q^{(1)}(B_g)$ and the positivity of $Q^{(1)}(C_g)$.
Quantum channels, which break entanglement, incompatibility, or nonlocality, are not useful for entanglement-based, one-sided device-independent, or device-independent quantum information processing, respectively. Here, we show that such breaking channels are related to certain temporal quantum correlations, i.e., temporal separability, channel unsteerability, temporal unsteerability, and macrorealism. More specifically, we first define the steerability-breaking channel, which is conceptually similar to the entanglement and nonlocality-breaking channels and prove that it is identical to the incompatibility-breaking channel. Similar to the hierarchy relations of the temporal and spatial quantum correlations, the hierarchy of non-breaking channels is discussed. We then introduce the concept of the channels which break temporal correlations, explain how they are related to the standard breaking channels, and prove the following results: (1) A certain measure of temporal nonseparability can be used to quantify a non-entanglement-breaking channel in the sense that the measure is a memory monotone under the framework of the resource theory of the quantum memory. (2) A non-steerability-breaking channel can be certified with channel steering because the steerability-breaking channel is equivalent to the incompatibility-breaking channel. (3) The temporal steerability and non-macrorealism can, respectively, distinguish the steerability-breaking and the nonlocality-breaking unital channel from their corresponding non-breaking channels. Finally, a two-dimensional depolarizing channel is experimentally implemented as a proof-of-principle example to compare the temporal quantum correlations with non-breaking channels.