A single-party strategy in a multi-round quantum protocol can be implemented by sequential networks of quantum operations connected by internal memories. Here provide the most efficient realization in terms of computational-space resources.
Anonymity in networked communication is vital for many privacy-preserving tasks. Secure key distribution alone is insufficient for high-security communications, often knowing who transmits a message to whom and when must also be kept hidden from an a
dversary. Here we experimentally demonstrate 5 information-theoretically secure anonymity protocols on an 8 user city-wide quantum network using polarisation-entangled photon pairs. At the heart of these protocols is anonymous broadcasting, which is a cryptographic primitive that allows one user to reveal one bit of information while keeping her identity anonymous. For a network of $n$ users, the protocols retain anonymity for the sender, given less than $n-2$ users are dishonest. This is one of the earliest implementations of genuine multi-user cryptographic protocols beyond standard QKD. Our anonymous protocols enhance the functionality of any fully-connected Quantum Key Distribution network without trusted nodes.
We start with the task of discriminating finitely many multipartite quantum states using LOCC protocols, with the goal to optimize the probability of correctly identifying the state. We provide two different methods to show that finitely many measure
ment outcomes in every step are sufficient for approaching the optimal probability of discrimination. In the first method, each measurement of an optimal LOCC protocol, applied to a $d_{rm loc}$-dim local system, is replaced by one with at most $2d_{rm loc}^2$ outcomes, without changing the probability of success. In the second method, we decompose any LOCC protocol into a convex combination of a number of slim protocols in which each measurement applied to a $d_{rm loc}$-dim local system has at most $d_{rm loc}^2$ outcomes. To maximize any convex functions in LOCC (including the probability of state discrimination or fidelity of state transformation), an optimal protocol can be replaced by the best slim protocol in the convex decomposition without using shared randomness. For either method, the bound on the number of outcomes per measurement is independent of the global dimension, the number of parties, the depth of the protocol, how deep the measurement is located, and applies to LOCC protocols with infinite rounds, and the measurement compression can be done top-down -- independent of later operations in the LOCC protocol. The second method can be generalized to implement LOCC instruments with finitely many outcomes: if the instrument has $n$ coarse-grained final measurement outcomes, global input dimension $D_0$ and global output dimension $D_i$ for $i=1,...,n$ conditioned on the $i$-th outcome, then one can obtain the instrument as a convex combination of no more than $R=sum_{i=1}^n D_0^2 D_i^2 - D_0^2 + 1$ slim protocols; in other words, $log_2 R$ bits of shared randomess suffice.
In certain cases the communication time required to deterministically implement a nonlocal bipartite unitary using prior entanglement and LOCC (local operations and classical communication) can be reduced by a factor of two. We introduce two such fas
t protocols and illustrate them with various examples. For some simple unitaries, the entanglement resource is used quite efficiently. The problem of exactly which unitaries can be implemented by these two protocols remains unsolved, though there is some evidence that the set of implementable unitaries may expand at the cost of using more entanglement.
We develop an extension of the process matrix (PM) framework for correlations between quantum operations with no causal order that allows multiple rounds of information exchange for each party compatibly with the assumption of well-defined causal ord
er of events locally. We characterise the higher-order process describing such correlations, which we name the multi-round process matrix (MPM), and formulate a notion of causal nonseparability for it that extends the one for standard PMs. We show that in the multi-round case there are novel manifestations of causal nonseparability that are not captured by a naive application of the standard PM formalism: we exhibit an instance of an operator that is both a valid PM and a valid MPM, but is causally separable in the first case and can violate causal inequalities in the second case due to the possibility of using a side channel.
We quantitatively assess the energetic cost of several well-known control protocols that achieve a finite time adiabatic dynamics, namely counterdiabatic and local counterdiabatic driving, optimal control, and inverse engineering. By employing a cost
measure based on the norm of the total driving Hamiltonian, we show that a hierarchy of costs emerges that is dependent on the protocol duration. As case studies we explore the Landau-Zener model, the quantum harmonic oscillator, and the Jaynes-Cummings model and establish that qualitatively similar results hold in all cases. For the analytically tractable Landau-Zener case, we further relate the effectiveness of a control protocol with the spectral features of the new driving Hamiltonians and show that in the case of counterdiabatic driving, it is possible to further minimize the cost by optimizing the ramp.