No Arabic abstract
The efficient certification of nonclassical effects of light forms the basis for applications in optical quantum technologies. We derive general correlation conditions for the verification of nonclassical light based on multiplexed detection. The obtained nonclassicality criteria are valid for imperfectly-balanced multiplexing scenarios with on-off detectors and do not require any knowledge about the detector system. In this sense they are fully independent of the detector system. In our experiment, we study light emitted by clusters of single-photon emitters, whose photon number may exceed the number of detection channels. Even under such conditions, our criteria certify nonclassicality with high statistical significance.
Bell nonlocality between distant quantum systems---i.e., joint correlations which violate a Bell inequality---can be verified without trusting the measurement devices used, nor those performing the measurements. This leads to unconditionally secure protocols for quantum information tasks such as cryptographic key distribution. However, complete verification of Bell nonlocality requires high detection efficiencies, and is not robust to the typical transmission losses that occur in long distance applications. In contrast, quantum steering, a weaker form of quantum correlation, can be verified for arbitrarily low detection efficiencies and high losses. The cost is that current steering-verification protocols require complete trust in one of the measurement devices and its operator, allowing only one-sided secure key distribution. We present device-independent steering protocols that remove this need for trust, even when Bell nonlocality is not present. We experimentally demonstrate this principle for singlet states and states that do not violate a Bell inequality.
If entanglement could be verified without any trust in the devices of observers, i.e., in a device-independent (DI) way, then unconditional security can be guaranteed for various quantum information tasks. In this work, we propose an experimental-friendly DI protocol to certify the presence of entanglement, based on Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering. We first establish the DI verification framework, relying on the measurement-device-independent technique and self-testing, and show it is able to verify all EPR-steerable states. In the context of three-measurement settings as per party, it is found to be noise robustness towards inefficient measurements and imperfect self-testing. Finally, a four-photon experiment is implemented to device-independently verify EPR-steering even for Bell local states. Our work paves the way for realistic implementations of secure quantum information tasks.
In this paper we report an experiment that verifies an atomic-ensemble quantum memory via a measurement-device-independent scheme. A single photon generated via Rydberg blockade in one atomic ensemble is stored in another atomic ensemble via electromagnetically induced transparency. After storage for a long duration, this photon is retrieved and interfered with a second photon to perform joint Bell-state measurement (BSM). Quantum state for each photon is chosen based on a quantum random number generator respectively in each run. By evaluating correlations between the random states and BSM results, we certify that our memory is genuinely entanglement-preserving.
We introduce a method for the verification of nonclassical light which is independent of the complex interaction between the generated light and the material of the detectors. This is accomplished by means of a multiplexing arrangement. Its theoretical description yields that the coincidence statistics of this measurement layout is a mixture of multinomial distributions for any classical light field and any type of detector. This allows us to formulate bounds on the statistical properties of classical states. We apply our directly accessible method to heralded multiphoton states which are detected with a single multiplexing step only and two detectors, which are in our work superconducting transition-edge sensors. The nonclassicality of the generated light is verified and characterized through the violation of the classical bounds without the need for characterizing the used detectors.
We show that genuine multipartite entanglement of all multipartite pure states in arbitrary finite dimension can be detected in a device-independent way by employing bipartite Bell inequalities on states that are deterministically generated from the initial state via local operations. This leads to an efficient scheme for large classes of multipartite states that are relevant in quantum computation or condensed-matter physics, including cluster states and the ground state of the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) model. For cluster states the detection of genuine multipartite entanglement involves only measurements on a constant number of systems with an overhead that scales linear with the system size, while for the AKLT model the overhead is polynomial. In all cases our approach shows robustness against experimental imperfections.