No Arabic abstract
We show that a quantum walk process can be used to construct and secure quantum memory. More precisely, we show that a localized quantum walk with temporal disorder can be engineered to store the information of a single, unknown qubit on a compact position space and faithfully recover it on demand. Since the localization occurss with a finite spread in position space, the stored information of the qubit will be naturally secured from the simple eavesdropper. Our protocol can be adopted to any quantum system for which experimental control over quantum walk dynamics can be achieved.
Blockchain is a distributed database which is cryptographically protected against malicious modifications. While promising for a wide range of applications, current blockchain platforms rely on digital signatures, which are vulnerable to attacks by means of quantum computers. The same, albeit to a lesser extent, applies to cryptographic hash functions that are used in preparing new blocks, so parties with access to quantum computation would have unfair advantage in procuring mining rewards. Here we propose a possible solution to the quantum era blockchain challenge and report an experimental realization of a quantum-safe blockchain platform that utilizes quantum key distribution across an urban fiber network for information-theoretically secure authentication. These results address important questions about realizability and scalability of quantum-safe blockchains for commercial and governmental applications.
It is demonstrated that in gate-based quantum computing architectures quantum walk is a natural mathematical description of quantum gates. It originates from field-matter interaction driving the system, but is not attached to specific qubit designs and can be formulated for very general field-matter interactions. It is shown that, most generally, gates are described by a set of coined quantum walks. Rotating wave and resonant approximations for field-matter interaction simplify the walks, factorizing the coin, and leading to pure continuous time quantum walk description. The walks reside on a graph formed by the Hilbert space of all involved qubits and auxiliary states, if present. Physical interactions between different parts of the system necessary to propagate entanglement through such graph -- quantum network -- enter via reduction of symmetries in graph edges. Description for several single- and two-qubit gates are given as examples.
The symmetries associated with discrete-time quantum walks (DTQWs) and the flexibilities in controlling their dynamical parameters allow to create a large number of topological phases. An interface in position space, which separates two regions with different topological numbers, can, for example, be effectively modelled using different coin parameters for the walk on either side of the interface. Depending on the neighbouring numbers, this can lead to localized states in one-dimensional configurations and here we carry out a detailed study into the strength of such localized states. We show that it can be related to the amount of entanglement created by the walks, with minima appearing for strong localizations. This feature also persists in the presence of small amounts of $sigma_x$ (bit flip) noise.
A new scheme of Quantum Key Distribution is proposed using three entangled particles in a GHZ state. Alice holds a 3-particle source and sends two particles to Bob, keeping one with herself. Bob uses one particle to generate a secure key, and the other to generate a master-key. This scheme should prove to be harder to break in non-ideal situations as compared to the standard protocols BB84 and Eckert. The scheme uses the concept of Quantum Disentanglement Eraser. Extension to multi-partite scheme has also been investigated.
In single-qubit quantum secret sharing, a secret is shared between N parties via manipulation and measurement of one qubit at a time. Each qubit is sent to all N parties in sequence; the secret is encoded in the first participants preparation of the qubit state and the subsequent participants choices of state rotation or measurement basis. We present a protocol for single-qubit quantum secret sharing using polarization entanglement of photon pairs produced in type-I spontaneous parametric downconversion. We investigate the protocols security against eavesdropping attack under common experimental conditions: a lossy channel for photon transmission, and imperfect preparation of the initial qubit state. A protocol which exploits entanglement between photons, rather than simply polarization correlation, is more robustly secure. We implement the entanglement-based secret-sharing protocol with 87% secret-sharing fidelity, limited by the purity of the entangled state produced by our present apparatus. We demonstrate a photon-number splitting eavesdropping attack, which achieves no success against the entanglement-based protocol while showing the predicted rate of success against a correlation-based protocol.