No Arabic abstract
We present an experimentally feasible and efficient method for detecting entangled states with measurements that extend naturally to a tomographically complete set. Our detection criterion is based on measurements from subsets of a quantum 2-design, e.g., mutually unbiased bases or symmetric informationally complete states, and has several advantages over standard entanglement witnesses. First, as more detectors in the measurement are applied, there is a higher chance of witnessing a larger set of entangled states, in such a way that the measurement setting converges to a complete setup for quantum state tomography. Secondly, our method is twice as effective as standard witnesses in the sense that both upper and lower bounds can be derived. Thirdly, the scheme can be readily applied to measurement-device-independent scenarios.
We investigate quantum state tomography (QST) for pure states and quantum process tomography (QPT) for unitary channels via $adaptive$ measurements. For a quantum system with a $d$-dimensional Hilbert space, we first propose an adaptive protocol where only $2d-1$ measurement outcomes are used to accomplish the QST for $all$ pure states. This idea is then extended to study QPT for unitary channels, where an adaptive unitary process tomography (AUPT) protocol of $d^2+d-1$ measurement outcomes is constructed for any unitary channel. We experimentally implement the AUPT protocol in a 2-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance system. We examine the performance of the AUPT protocol when applied to Hadamard gate, $T$ gate ($pi/8$ phase gate), and controlled-NOT gate, respectively, as these gates form the universal gate set for quantum information processing purpose. As a comparison, standard QPT is also implemented for each gate. Our experimental results show that the AUPT protocol that reconstructing unitary channels via adaptive measurements significantly reduce the number of experiments required by standard QPT without considerable loss of fidelity.
One of the fundamental problem to explore the potential and advantage of quantum technology is the char acterization and quantification of the quantum correlations, especially entanglement. In [Phys. Rev. A 94, 032129 (2016)], the author proposed the minimal discord over state extensions as the measure of entanglement. In this work, we show that the minimal Bures distance of discord over state extensions is equivalent to the Bures distance of entanglement and its convex roof. This equivalence puts discord in a more primitive place than entanglement conceptually, that is, entanglement can be interpreted as the irreducible part of discord over all state extensions. Moreover, for bipartite state, we also show that the minimal quantum discord over a kind of symmetric state extensions is an entanglement monotone, i.e., non-increasing under local operation and classical communications. The results presented here show that a large class of discord measures can be used to construct entanglement measures. In particular, although Hilbert-Schmidt distance is not contractive, our result show that the corresponding quantification is an entanglement monotone in our framework.
With nowadays steadily growing quantum processors, it is required to develop new quantum tomography tools that are tailored for high-dimensional systems. In this work, we describe such a computational tool, based on recent ideas from non-convex optimization. The algorithm excels in the compressed-sensing-like setting, where only a few data points are measured from a low-rank or highly-pure quantum state of a high-dimensional system. We show that the algorithm can practically be used in quantum tomography problems that are beyond the reach of convex solvers, and, moreover, is faster than other state-of-the-art non-convex approaches. Crucially, we prove that, despite being a non-convex program, under mild conditions, the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the global minimum of the problem; thus, it constitutes a provable quantum state tomography protocol.
In this work, we establish a general theory of phase transitions and quantum entanglement in the equilibrium state at arbitrary temperatures. First, we derived a set of universal functional relations between the matrix elements of two-body reduced density matrix of the canonical density matrix and the Helmholtz free energy of the equilibrium state, which implies that the Helmholtz free energy and its derivatives are directly related to entanglement measures because any entanglement measures are defined as a function of the reduced density matrix. Then we show that the first order phase transitions are signaled by the matrix elements of reduced density matrix while the second order phase transitions are witnessed by the first derivatives of the reduced density matrix elements. Near second order phase transition point, we show that the first derivative of the reduced density matrix elements present universal scaling behaviors. Finally we establish a theorem which connects the phase transitions and entanglement at arbitrary temperatures. Our general results are demonstrated in an experimentally relevant many-body spin model.
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a quantum state tomography protocol that generalizes the Wallentowitz-Vogel-Banaszek-Wodkiewicz point-by-point Wigner function reconstruction. The full density operator of an arbitrary quantum state is efficiently reconstructed in the Fock basis, using semidefinite programming, after interference with a small set of calibrated coherent states. This new protocol is resource- and computationally efficient, is robust against noise, does not rely on approximate state displacements, and ensures the physicality of results.