No Arabic abstract
Understanding gravity in the framework of quantum mechanics is one of the great challenges in modern physics. Along this line, a prime question is to find whether gravity is a quantum entity subject to the rules of quantum mechanics. It is fair to say that there are no feasible ideas yet to test the quantum coherent behaviour of gravity directly in a laboratory experiment. Here, we introduce an idea for such a test based on the principle that two objects cannot be entangled without a quantum mediator. We show that despite the weakness of gravity, the phase evolution induced by the gravitational interaction of two micron size test masses in adjacent matter-wave interferometers can detectably entangle them even when they are placed far apart enough to keep Casimir-Polder forces at bay. We provide a prescription for witnessing this entanglement, which certifies gravity as a quantum coherent mediator, through simple correlation measurements between two spins: one embedded in each test mass. Fundamentally, the above entanglement is shown to certify the presence of non-zero off-diagonal terms in the coherent state basis of the gravitational field modes.
We investigate the evolution of entanglement in multiple-quantum (MQ) NMR experiments in crystals with pairs of close nuclear spins-1/2. The initial thermodynamic equilibrium state of the system in a strong external magnetic field evolves under the non-secular part of the dipolar Hamiltonian. As a result, MQ coherences of the zeroth and plus/minus second orders appear. A simple condition for the emergence of entanglement is obtained. We show that the measure of the spin pair entanglement, concurrence, coincides qualitatively with the intensity of MQ coherences of the plus/minus second order and hence the entanglement can be studied with MQ NMR methods. We introduce an Entanglement Witness using MQ NMR coherences of the plus/minus second order.
We show that the atom interferometric coherence revival test suggested in [arXiv:2101.11629 [quant-ph] (2021)] does not test the quantum nature of the gravitational field when the atoms are coupled to a mechanical oscillator prepared in a thermal state. Specifically we clarify that the same coherence revivals take place in a model where the atoms are coupled to a classical oscillator through a classical gravitational field. We further elucidate the quantum mechanical calculation, showing that entanglement is not the source of the revivals. The suggested test is thus only relevant for pure initial quantum states of the oscillator. In this regime, numerical estimates show that it is unfeasible to do a test of the proposed type.
We introduce a feasible method of constructing the entanglement witness that detects the genuine entanglement of a given pure multiqubit state. We illustrate our method in the scenario of constructing the witnesses for the multiqubit states that are broadly theoretically and experimentally investigated. It is shown that our method can construct the effective witnesses for experiments. We also investigate the entanglement detection of symmetric states and mixed states.
An entanglement measure for a bipartite quantum system is a state functional that vanishes on separable states and that does not increase under separable (local) operations. It is well-known that for pure states, essentially all entanglement measures are equal to the v. Neumann entropy of the reduced state, but for mixed states, this uniqueness is lost. In quantum field theory, bipartite systems are associated with causally disjoint regions. There are no separable (normal) states to begin with when the regions touch each other, so one must leave a finite safety-corridor. Due to this corridor, the normal states of bipartite systems are necessarily mixed, and the v. Neumann entropy is not a good entanglement measure in the above sense. In this paper, we study various entanglement measures which vanish on separable states, do not increase under separable (local) operations, and have other desirable properties. In particular, we study the relative entanglement entropy, defined as the minimum relative entropy between the given state and an arbitrary separable state. We establish rigorous upper and lower bounds in various quantum field theoretic (QFT) models, as well as also model-independent ones. The former include free fields on static spacetime manifolds in general dimensions, or integrable models with factorizing $S$-matrix in 1+1 dimensions. The latter include bounds on ground states in general conformal QFTs, charged states (including charges with braid-group statistics) or thermal states in theories satisfying a nuclearity condition. Typically, the bounds show a divergent behavior when the systems get close to each other--sometimes of the form of a generalized area law--and decay when the systems are far apart. Our main technical tools are of operator algebraic nature.
This work is originally a Cambridge Part III essay paper. Quantum complexity arises as an alternative measure to the Fubini metric between two quantum states. Given two states and a set of allowed gates, it is defined as the least complex unitary operator capable of transforming one state into the other. Starting with K qubits evolving through a k-local Hamiltonian, it is possible to draw an analogy between the quantum system and an auxiliary classical system. Using the definition of complexity to define a metric for the classical system, it is possible to relate its entropy with the quantum complexity of the K qubits, defining the Second Law of Quantum Complexity. The law states that, if it is not already saturated, the quantum complexity of a system will increase with an overwhelming probability towards its maximum value. In the context of AdS/CFT duality and the ER=EPR conjecture, the growth of the volume of the Einstein Rosen bridge interior is proportional to the quantum complexity of the instantaneous state of the conformal field theory. Therefore, the interior of the wormhole connecting two entangled CFT will grow as a natural consequence of the complexification of the boundary state.