Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) guarantees unconditional security of secret key without making assumptions about the internal workings of the devices used. It does so using the loophole-free violation of a Bells inequality. The pr
imary challenge in realizing DIQKD in practice is the detection loophole problem that is inherent to photonic tests of Bells inequalities over lossy channels. We revisit the proposal of Curty and Moroder [Phys. Rev. A 84, 010304(R) (2011)] to use a linear optics-based entanglement-swapping relay (ESR) to counter this problem. We consider realistic models for the entanglement sources and photodetectors; more precisely, (a) polarization-entangled states based on pulsed spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC) sources with infinitely higher order multi-photon components and multimode spectral structure, and (b) on-off photodetectors with non-unit efficiencies and non-zero dark count probabilities. We show that the ESR-based scheme is robust against the above imperfections and enables positive key rates at distances much larger than what is possible otherwise.
In spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) based quantum information processing (QIP) experiments, there is a tradeoff between the coincide count rates (i.e. the pumping power of the SPDC), which limits the rate of the protocol, and the visibil
ity of the quantum interference, which limits the quality of the protocol. This tradeoff is mainly caused by the multi-photon pair emissions from the SPDCs. In theory, the problem is how to model the experiments without truncating these multi-photon emissions while including practical imperfections. In this paper, we establish a method to theoretically simulate SPDC based QIPs which fully incorporates the effect of multi-photon emissions and various practical imperfections. The key ingredient in our method is the application of the characteristic function formalism which has been used in continuous variable QIPs. We apply our method to three examples, the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen interference experiments, and the concatenated entanglement swapping protocol. For the first two examples, we show that our theoretical results quantitatively agree with the recent experimental results. Also we provide the closed expressions for these the interference visibilities with the full multi-photon components and various imperfections. For the last example, we provide the general theoretical form of the concatenated entanglement swapping protocol in our method and show the numerical results up to 5 concatenations. Our method requires only a small computation resource (few minutes by a commercially available computer) which was not possible by the previous theoretical approach. Our method will have applications in a wide range of SPDC based QIP protocols with high accuracy and a reasonable computation resource.
We study non-Gaussian states generated by two-photon subtraction from a cw squeezed light source. In a cw scheme one can subtract two photons from the source with a designated time separation and can genarate temporally multiplexed superposition stat
es of continuous variables. We numerically study the properties of these states in the light of bosonic interference in the time domain. In an appropriate temporal mode amplified kittens are produced in a region where the time separation is comparable with the correlation time of squeezed packets.
We investigate strategies for estimating a depolarizing channel for a finite dimensional system. Our analysis addresses the double optimization problem of selecting the best input probe state and the measurement strategy that minimizes the Bayes cost
of a quadratic function. In the qubit case, we derive the Bayes optimal strategy for any finite number of input probe particles when bipartite entanglement can be formed in the probe particles.
Suppose that three kinds of quantum systems are given in some unknown states $ket f^{otimes N}$, $ket{g_1}^{otimes K}$, and $ket{g_2}^{otimes K}$, and we want to decide which textit{template} state $ket{g_1}$ or $ket{g_2}$, each representing the feat
ure of the pattern class ${cal C}_1$ or ${cal C}_2$, respectively, is closest to the input textit{feature} state $ket f$. This is an extension of the pattern matching problem into the quantum domain. Assuming that these states are known a priori to belong to a certain parametric family of pure qubit systems, we derive two kinds of matching strategies. The first is a semiclassical strategy which is obtained by the natural extension of conventional matching strategies and consists of a two-stage procedure: identification (estimation) of the unknown template states to design the classifier (textit{learning} process to train the classifier) and classification of the input system into the appropriate pattern class based on the estimated results. The other is a fully quantum strategy without any intermediate measurement which we might call as the {it universal quantum matching machine}. We present the Bayes optimal solutions for both strategies in the case of K=1, showing that there certainly exists a fully quantum matching procedure which is strictly superior to the straightforward semiclassical extension of the conventional matching strategy based on the learning process.
A quantum channel is derived for continuous variable teleportation which is performed by means of an arbitrary entangled state and the standard protocol. When a Gaussian entangled state such as a two-mode squeezed-vacuum state is used, the continuous
variable teleportation is equivalent to the thermalizing quantum channel. Continuous variable dense coding is also considered. Both the continuous variable teleportation and the continuous variable dense coding are characterized by the same function determined by the entangled state and the quantum measurement.
