Whereas single- and two-photon wave packets are usually treated as pure states, in practice they will be mixed. We study how entanglement created with mixed photon wave packets is degraded. We find in particular that the entanglement of a delocalized single-photon state of the electro-magnetic field is determined simply by its purity. We also discuss entanglement for two-photon mixed states, as well as the influence of a vacuum component.
The dynamical map of entanglement and mixedness in four-qubit maximally entangled GHZ state paired with classical channels driven by fractional Gaussian noise is investigated. The qubit-channel coupling is assumed in four distinct ways: common, bipartite, tripartite, and independent local channel-qubit configurations comprising single, double, triple, or independent noisy sources. Using entanglement witness, negativity, purity and von Neumann entropy, except for the independent configuration, we show that indefinite entanglement and purity preservation may be simulated in multipartite GHZ-like…
Knowledge of the relationships among different features of quantumness, like entanglement and state purity, is important from both fundamental and practical viewpoints. Yet, this issue remains little explored in dynamical contexts for open quantum systems. We address this problem by studying the dynamics of entanglement and purity for two-qubit systems using paradigmatic models of radiation-matter interaction, with a qubit being isolated from the environment (spectator configuration). We show the effects of the corresponding local quantum channels on an initial two-qubit pure entangled state i…
The entanglement, purity and energy of two isolated two-level atoms which are initially prepared in Bell state and each interacts with a thermal cavity field are investigated by considering the atomic motion and the field-mode structure. We achieve the analytical solutions of the atomic qubits by using the algebraic dynamical approach and the influences of the field-mode structure parameter, the strength of the thermal field and the detuning on the entanglement, purity and energy are discussed. We also investigate the state evolution of the atomic qubits based on the entanglement-purity-energy…
We provide a graphical description of the entanglement of pure-state multiparty systems based on an analogy between a bipartite purity analysis and the centroid of a collection of point masses. This description applies to quantum systems with $N$ parties, each with an arbitrary number of (discrete) states. The case of $N$ qubits is highlighted for simplicity. This geometric description illustrates some of the restrictions in the form of inequalities that apply to entanglement in multiparty systems.
We establish contact between the delocalization properties of pure quantum states, as quantified by their number of principal components, and the average generalized entanglement properties, as quantified by purity measures relative to different observable sets. We find that correlations between products of state vector components with respect to Hamming distance play an important role in the structure of subsystem-based purity measures. In particular, we derive general conditions under which the amount of global multipartite entanglement relates to the inverse participation ratio averaged ove…
A generic model of measurement device which is able to directly measure commonly used quantum-state characteristics such as fidelity, overlap, purity and Hilbert-Schmidt distance for two general uncorrelated mixed states is proposed. In addition, for two correlated mixed states, the measurement realizes an entanglement witness for Werner's separability criterion. To determine these observables, the estimation only one parameter - the visibility of interference, is needed. The implementations in cavity QED, trapped ion and electromagnetically induced transparency experiments are discussed.
We show that entanglement can always arise in the interaction of an arbitrarily large system in any mixed state with a single qubit in a pure state. This small initial purity is enough to enforce entanglement even when the total entropy is close to maximum. We demonstrate this feature using the Jaynes-Cummings interaction of a two level atom in a pure state with a field in a thermal state at an arbitrarily high temperature. We find the time and temperature variation of a lower bound on the amount of entanglement produced and study the classical correlations quantified by the mutual information…
The relation between the symplectic and Lorentz groups is explored to investigate entanglement features in a two-mode bipartite Gaussian state. We verify that the correlation matrix of arbitrary Gaussian states can be associated to a hyperbolic space with a Minkowski metric, which is divided in two regions - separablelike and entangledlike, in equivalence to timelike and spacelike in special relativity. This correspondence naturally allows the definition of two insightful invariant squared distances measures - one related to the purity and another related to amount of entanglement. The second …
We study the relationship between the entanglement, mixedness and energy of two-qubit and two-mode Gaussian quantum states. We parametrize the set of allowed states of these two fundamentally different physical systems using measures of entanglement, mixedness and energy that allow us to compare and contrast the two systems using a phase diagram. This phase diagram enables one to clearly identify not only the physically allowed states, but the set of states connected under an arbitrary quantum operation. We pay particular attention to the maximally entangled mixed states (MEMS) of each system.…
Given a finite number $N$ of copies of a qubit state we compute the maximum fidelity that can be attained using joint-measurement protocols for estimating its purity. We prove that in the asymptotic $N\to\infty$ limit, separable-measurement protocols can be as efficient as the optimal joint-measurement one if classical communication is used. This in turn shows that the optimal estimation of the entanglement of a two-qubit state can also be achieved asymptotically with fully separable measurements. The relationship between our global Bayesian approach and the quantum Cramer-Rao bound is also di…
In this work, we show that while all measures of mixedness may be used to witness entanglement, all such entangled states must have a negative partial transpose (NPT). Though computing the negativity of the partial transpose scales well at high dimension, it relies on knowing the complete quantum state, which does not. To address this, we compare different measures of mixedness over uniform ensembles of joint quantum states at varying dimension to gauge their relative success in witnessing entanglement. In doing so, we find that comparing joint and marginal purities is overwhelmingly more succ…
Single-photons with high spectro-temporal purity are an essential resource for quantum photonic technologies. The highest reported purity up until now from a conventional silicon photonic device is 92% without any spectral filtering. We have experimentally generated and observed single-photons with 98.0+-0.3 % spectro-temporal purity using a conventional micro racetrack resonator and an engineered dual pump pulse.
We study the evolution of purity, entanglement and total correlations of general two--mode Gaussian states of continuous variable systems in arbitrary uncorrelated Gaussian environments. The time evolution of purity, Von Neumann entropy, logarithmic negativity and mutual information is analyzed for a wide range of initial conditions. In general, we find that a local squeezing of the bath leads to a faster degradation of purity and entanglement, while it can help to preserve the mutual information between the modes.
The SU(2) and SU(3) Lie algebras lend themselves naturally to studies of two- and three-well Bose-Einstein condensates, with the group operators being expressed in terms of bosonic annihilation and creation operators at each site. The success of these representations has led to the purities associated with these algebras to be promoted as a measure of entanglement between the atomic modes in each well. In this report, we show that these purities do not provide an unambiguous measure, but instead give results which depend on the quantum statistical states of each atomic mode. Using the example …
We present methods for evaluating the rate of change in quantities during quantum evolution due to coupling to the environment (dissipation hereafter). The protocol is based on repeating a given quantum circuit (or quantum operation) twice, thrice, and so on, and measuring an expectation value after each number of repetitions. We start by applying this method for measuring the rate of purity changes in quantum circuits. This provides direct information on the quality of the circuit. Furthermore, the presented scheme enables to distill the dissipative contribution in the changes of quantities s…
We study the quantum entanglement produced by a head-on collision between two gaussian wave packets in three-dimensional space. By deriving the two-particle wave function modified by s-wave scattering amplitudes, we obtain an approximate analytic expression of the purity of an individual particle. The loss of purity provides an indicator of the degree of entanglement. In the case the wave packets are narrow in momentum space, we show that the loss of purity is solely controlled by the ratio of the scattering cross section to the transverse area of the wave packets.
We analyze the quantum-state purity of heralded single photons produced from frequency-anti-correlated biphotons. We find that the quantum-state purity in time-frequency domain depends strongly on the response time uncertainty of the trigger-photon detector that heralds the generation of its paired photon. If the trigger response time is much shorter than the two-photon coherence time, the time-frequency quantum-state purity of heralded single photons approaches unity and the heralded single photon is in a nearly pure state. If the trigger response time is much longer than the two-photon coher…
We have studied the purity of entangled photon-pairs generated in a dispersion-shifted fiber at various temperatures. Two-photon interference with visibility > 98% is observed at 77K, without subtraction of the background Raman photons.
Advanced photonic quantum technology relies on multi-photon interference which requires bright sources of high-purity single photons. Here, we implement a novel domain-engineering technique for tailoring the nonlinearity of a parametric down-conversion crystal. We create pairs of independently-heralded telecom-wavelength photons and achieve high heralding, brightness and spectral purities without filtering.
Optical quantum protocols are reliant on the production of highly pure single photons. However, most parametric heralded single photon sources possess spectral correlations, limiting the purity of the produced photon. The most common method for restoring the purity is with narrowband spectral filtering, which comes at the cost of reducing the rate of heralding detection. Here, we characterize this trade-off analytically for a large class of parametric sources. It is possible to achieve up to 20% heralding success probabilities with 90% heralded photon purities.
We study production of entanglement with highly-mixed states. We find that entanglement between highly mixed states can be generated via a direct unitary interaction even when both states have purities arbitrarily close to zero. This indicates that purity of a subsystem is not required for entanglement generation. Our result is in contrast to previous studies where the importance of the subsystem purity was emphasized.
We investigate the entanglement dynamics and purity of a two-level atom, which is additionally driven by a classical field, interacting with a coherent field in a dissipative environment. It is shown that the amount of entanglement and the purity of the system can be improved by controlling the classical field.
Quantum decoherence due to imperfect manipulation of quantum devices is a key issue in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Standard analyses in quantum information and quantum computation use error rates to parameterize quantum noise channels. However, there is no explicit relation between the decoherence effect induced by a noise channel and its error rate. In this work, we propose to characterize the decoherence effect of a noise channel by the physical implementability of its inverse, which is a universal parameter quantifying the difficulty to simulate the noise inverse with a…
Trapped atomic ions are an ideal candidate for quantum network nodes, with long-lived identical qubit memories that can be locally entangled through their Coulomb interaction and remotely entangled through photonic channels. The integrity of this photonic interface is generally reliant on purity of single photons produced by the quantum memory. Here we demonstrate a single-photon source for quantum networking based on a trapped $^{138}\mbox{Ba}^+$ ion with a single photon purity of $ g^{2}(0)=(8.1\pm2.3)\times 10^{-5} $ without background subtraction. We further optimize the tradeoff between t…
To explore the properties of a two-qubit mixed state, we consider quantum teleportation. The fidelity of a teleported state depends on the resource state purity and entanglement, as characterized by concurrence. Concurrence and purity are functions of state parameters. However, it turns out that a state with larger purity and concurrence, may have comparatively smaller fidelity. By computing teleportation fidelity, concurrence and purity for two-qubit X-states, we show it explicitly. We further show that fidelity changes monotonically with respect to functions of parameters - other than concur…
The quantum correlations, including entanglement and discord with its geometric measure, and classical correlation are studied for a bipartite partition of a open or closed quantum system. It is found that the purity of the initial state plays an important role in the dynamics of quantum and classical correlations. In the dephasing model, the quantum correlations loss and the classical correlation gain are instantaneously happen. While, the purity of the initial state destroys the quantum correlations which is resulted by the unitary interaction. Therefore, with the purity parameter, a particu…
We derive a monogamy inequality for entanglement and local contextuality, for any finite bipartite system. It essentially results from the relations between the purity of a local state and the entanglement of the global state, and between the purity of a state and its ability to violate a given noncontextuality inequality. We build an explicit entanglement monotone that satisfies the found monogamy inequality. An important consequence of this inequality, is that there are global states too entangled to violate the local noncontextuality inequality.
We demonstrate a method to determine the spectral purity of single photons. The technique is based on the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between a single photon state and a suitably prepared coherent field. We show that the temporal width of the HOM dip is not only related to reciprocal of the spectral width but also to the underlying quantum coherence. Therefore, by measuring the width of both the HOM dip and the spectrum one can directly quantify the degree of spectral purity. The distinct advantage of our proposal is that it obviates the need for perfect mode matching, since it does not …
We present an all-fibre source of high-purity heralded single photons with an integrated conditional optical gate that reduces uncorrelated noise by almost an order of magnitude. Generating photon pairs by four-wave mixing in photonic crystal fibre, we observe with the noise gate active a factor of 7 reduction in the rate of single counts in the heralded channel with no measurable drop in coincidence count rate. In contrast to electronic post-selection of coincidence events, the real reduction in the flux of unwanted photons is beneficial for example to avoid bleaching light-sensitive samples …
High-purity fluorescence photon bundle emission from two separate emitters
College of Physical Science and Technology, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学物理科学与技术学院）；School of Science, Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学理学院）
We experimentally demonstrate a source of nearly pure single photons in arbitrary temporal shapes heralded from a parametric down-conversion (PDC) source at telecom wavelengths. The technology is enabled by the tailored dispersion of in-house fabricated waveguides with shaped pump pulses to directly generate the PDC photons in on-demand temporal shapes. We generate PDC photons in Hermite-Gauss and frequency-binned modes and confirm a minimum purity of 0.81, even for complex temporal shapes.
Different degrees of freedom of single photons have been entangled and are used as a resource for various quantum technology applications. We present a simple scheme to perform Bell's test and show the violation of CHSH inequality in a path-entangled single photon state using interferometric and its equivalent non-interferometric approach in beam splitter setting. We demonstrate this experimentally by generating and controlling path-entangled state using both, heralded and un-heralded single photons from spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The experimental results we present show the trans…
Some features of the global entanglement of a composed quantum system can be quantified in terms of the purity of a balanced bipartition, made up of half of its subsystems. For the given bipartition, purity can always be minimized by taking a suitable (pure) state. When many bipartitions are considered, the requirement that purity be minimal for all bipartitions can engender conflicts and frustration arises. This unearths an interesting link between frustration and multipartite entanglement, defined as the average purity over all (balanced) bipartitions.
Entanglement is the backbone of quantum information science and its applications. Entangled states of light are necessary for distributed quantum protocols, quantum sensing and quantum internet. A distributed quantum network requires entanglement between light modes of different colours optimized for interaction with the nodes as well as for communication between them. Here we demonstrate a high-purity Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) entangled state between light modes with the wavelengths separated by more than 200 nm. The modes display $-7.7\pm0.5$ dB of two-mode entanglement and an overall st…
We show the existence of dynamical purity swapping phenomena in the Jaynes-Cummings model. Moreover we show that purity swapping between a qubit and a generic quantum system is possible, provided they are coupled via non-unitary matrix elements interaction. We particularize to the case of a quantum optical Ramsey interferometer. We show that using purity swapping, a perfect interference pattern can be obtained at the output port of the interferometer even if we start from totally unpolarized sources. This feature is shown to be associated with the phenomena of recreation of the state vector at…
Modeling and simulations of entanglement-based quantum-networking protocols commonly assume perfect entangled states. Some investigations have been performed which show how imperfections cause the efficiency of the protocols to rapidly deteriorate. For polarization-entangled states created by SPDC, the fundamentals of phase matching lead to a trade-off problem for the optimal properties of the state. We present a new SPDC method which circumvents the trade-off problem and allows one to obtain degeneracy, indistinguishability, and heralded-single-photon spectral purity greater than 99% for any …
We classify the entanglement of two--mode Gaussian states according to their degree of total and partial mixedness. We derive exact bounds that determine maximally and minimally entangled states for fixed global and marginal purities. This characterization allows for an experimentally reliable estimate of continuous variable entanglement based on measurements of purity.
When building a parametric downconversion photon-pair source with spectrally separable photons, e.g. for making high-purity heralded single photons, two practical issues must be accounted for: the design of the experiment, and its characterization. To address experiment design, we study the impact on spectral separability of realistic (sech shaped and chirped) pump fields, realistic nonlinear crystals with fabrication imperfections, and undesirable PDC generation far from the central PMF peak coming from nonlinearity shaping methods. To address experiment characterization, we study the effect …
Linear optics quantum computing (LOQC) is a leading candidate for the implementation of large scale quantum computers. Here quantum information is encoded into the quantum states of light and computation proceeds via a linear optics network. It is well known that in such schemes there are stringent requirements on the spatio-temporal structure of photons -- they must be completely indistinguishable and of very high purity. We show that in the Boson-sampling model for LOQC these conditions may be significantly relaxed. We present evidence that by increasing the size of the system we can impleme…
Bipartite entanglement between two parties of a composite quantum system can be quantified in terms of the purity of one party and there always exists a pure state of the total system that maximizes it (and minimizes purity). When many different bipartitions are considered, the requirement that purity be minimal for all bipartitions gives rise to the phenomenon of entanglement frustration. This feature, observed in quantum systems with both discrete and continuous variables, can be studied by means of a suitable cost function whose minimizers are the maximally multipartite-entangled states (MM…
Photonic time-frequency entanglement is a promising resource for quantum information processing technologies. We investigate swapping of continuous-variable entanglement in the time-frequency degree of freedom using three-wave mixing in the low-gain regime with the aim of producing heralded biphoton states with high purity and low multi-pair probability. Heralding is achieved by combining one photon from each of two biphoton sources via sum-frequency generation to create a herald photon. We present a realistic model with pulsed pumps, investigate the effects of resolving the frequency of the h…
Quantum programming languages enable developers to implement algorithms for quantum computers that promise computational breakthroughs in classically intractable tasks. Programming quantum computers requires awareness of entanglement, the phenomenon in which measurement outcomes of qubits are correlated. Entanglement can determine the correctness of algorithms and suitability of programming patterns. In this work, we formalize purity as a central tool for automating reasoning about entanglement in quantum programs. A pure expression is one whose evaluation is unaffected by the measurement outc…
We demonstrate the efficient heralded generation of high purity narrow-bandwidth single photons from a transient collective spin excitation in a hot atomic vapour cell. Employing optical homodyne tomography, we fully reconstruct the density matrix of the generated photon and observe a Wigner function reaching the zero value without correcting for any inefficiencies. The narrow bandwidth of the photon produced is accompanied by a high generation rate yielding a high spectral brightness. The source is therefore compatible with atomic-based quantum memories as well as other applications in light-…
We study dynamical generation of entanglement in bipartite quantum systems, characterized by purity (or linear entropy), and caused by the coupling between the two subsystems. Explicit semiclassical theory of purity decay is derived for integrable classical dynamics of the uncoupled system, and for localized (general Gaussian wave-packet) initial states. Purity decays as an algebraic function of time times strength of perturbation, independently of the Planck's constant.
In this paper we investigate several properties of the full signal-idler-pump mode quantum state generated by a triply resonant non-degenerate Optical Parametric Oscillator operating above threshold, with an injected wave on the signal and idler modes in order to lock the phase diffusion process. We determine and discuss the spectral purity of this state, which turns out not to be always equal to 1 even though the three interacting modes have been taken into account at the quantum level. We have seen that the purity is essentially dependent on the weak intensity of the injected light and on an…
Using cavity-enhanced non-degenerate parametric downconversion, we have built a frequency tunable source of heralded single photons with a narrow bandwidth of 8 MHz, making it compatible with atomic quantum memories. The photon state is 70% pure single photon as characterized by a tomographic measurement and reconstruction of the quantum state, revealing a clearly negative Wigner function. Furthermore, it has a spectral brightness of ~1,500 photons/s per MHz bandwidth, making it one of the brightest single photon sources available. We also investigate the correlation function of the down-conve…
