A locking protocol between two parties is as follows: Alice gives an encrypted classical message to Bob which she does not want Bob to be able to read until she gives him the key. If Alice is using classical resources, and she wants to approach uncon
ditional security, then the key and the message must have comparable sizes. But if Alice prepares a quantum state, the size of the key can be comparatively negligible. This effect is called quantum locking. Entanglement does not play a role in this quantum advantage. We show that, in this scenario, the quantum discord quantifies the advantage of the quantum protocol over the corresponding classical one for any classical-quantum state.
We address the presence of bound entanglement in strongly-interacting spin systems at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we consider thermal graph states composed of an arbitrary number of particles. We show that for a certain range of temperatures
no entanglement can be extracted by means of local operations and classical communication, even though the system is still entangled. This is found by harnessing the independence of the entanglement in some bipartitions of such states with the systems size. Specific examples for one- and two-dimensional systems are given. Our results thus prove the existence of thermal bound entanglement in an arbitrary large spin system with finite-range local interactions.
Quantum discord quantifies non-classical correlations in a quantum system including those not captured by entanglement. Thus, only states with zero discord exhibit strictly classical correlations. We prove that these states are negligible in the whol
e Hilbert space: typically a state picked out at random has positive discord; and, given a state with zero discord, a generic arbitrarily small perturbation drives it to a positive-discord state. These results hold for any Hilbert-space dimension, and have direct implications on quantum computation and on the foundations of the theory of open systems. In addition, we provide a simple necessary criterion for zero quantum discord. Finally, we show that, for almost all positive-discord states, an arbitrary Markovian evolution cannot lead to a sudden, permanent vanishing of discord.
We propose a geometric phase gate of two ion qubits that are encoded in two levels linked by an optical dipole-forbidden transition. Compared to hyperfine geometric phase gates mediated by electric dipole transitions, the gate has many interesting pr
operties, such as very low spontaneous emission rates, applicability to magnetic field insensitive states, and use of a co-propagating laser beam geometry. We estimate that current technology allows for infidelities of around 10$^{-4}$.
