The use of entangled light to illuminate objects is shown to provide significant enhancements over unentangled light for detecting and imaging those objects in the presence of high levels of noise and loss. Each signal sent out is entangled with an ancilla, which is retained. Detection takes place via an entangling measurement on the returning signal together with the ancilla. Quantum illumination with e bits of entanglement increases the effective signal-to-noise ratio of detection and imaging by a factor of 2^e, an exponential improvement over unentangled illumination.
Lloyd [1] proved that a large performance gain accrues from use of entanglement in single-photon target detection within a lossy, noisy environment when compared to what can be achieved with unentangled single-photon states. We show that the performance of Lloyd's "quantum illumination" system is, at best, equal to that of a coherent-state transmitter, and may be substantially worse. Nevertheless, as shown in [2], quantum illumination may offer a significant performance gain when operation is not limited to the single-photon regime.
There are many different classifications of entanglement for multipartite quantum systems, one of which is based on the number of unentangled particles. In this paper, we mainly study the quantum states containing at most $k-1$ unentangled particles and provide several entanglement criteria based on different forms of inequalities which can both identify quantum states containing at most $k-1$ unentangled particles. We show that these criteria are more effective for some states by concrete examples.
The purpose of this note is to give a generalization of Gleason's theorem inspired by recent work in quantum information theory on "nonlocality without entanglement." For multipartite quantum systems, each of dimension three or greater, the only nonnegative frame functions over the set of unentangled states are those given by the standard Born probability rule. However, if one system is of dimension 2 this is not necessarily the case.
Quantum state tomography (QST) aims at estimating a quantum state from averaged quantum measurements made on copies of the state. Most quantum algorithms rely on QST at some point and it is a well explored topic in the literature, mostly for mixed states. In this paper we focus on the QST of a pure quantum state using parallel unentangled measurements. Pure states are a small but useful subset of all quantum states, their tomography requires fewer measurements and is essentially a phase recovery problem. Parallel unentangled measurements are easy to implement in practice because they allow the…
The future of integrated quantum photonics relies heavily on the ability to engineer refined methods for preparing the quantum states needed to implement various quantum protocols. An important example of such states are quantum-correlated photon pairs, which can be efficiently generated using spontaneous nonlinear processes in integrated microring-resonator structures. In this work, we propose a method for generating spectrally unentangled photon pairs from a standard microring resonator. The method utilizes interference between a primary and a delayed secondary pump pulse to effectively incr…
It is a well-known fact that all the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics on the state of any physical system represented by a two-dimensional Hilbert space can always be duplicated by a noncontextual hidden-variables model. In this paper, I show that, in some cases, when we consider an additional independent (unentangled) two-dimensional system, the quantum description of the resulting composite system cannot be reproduced using noncontextual hidden variables. In particular, a no-hidden-variables proof is presented for two individual spin-1/2 particles preselected in an uncorrelated s…
It is shown here that a strengthening of Wallach's Unentangled Gleason Theorem can be obtained by applying results of the present authors on generalised Gleason theorems for quantum multi-measures arising from investigations of quantum decoherence functionals.
Based on the Bell theorem, it has been believed that a theoretical computation of the Bell correlation requires explicit use of an entangled state. Such a physical superposition of light waves occurs in the downconverter sources used in Bell experiments. However, this physical superposition is eliminated by wave propagation to spatially separated detectors. Bell correlations must therefore result from local waves, and the source boundary conditions of their previously entangled state. In the present model, Bell correlations are computed from disentangled separated waves, boundary conditions of…
We prove a deterministic exponential time upper bound for Quantum Merlin-Arthur games with k unentangled provers. This is the first non-trivial upper bound of QMA(k) better than NEXP and can be considered an exponential improvement, unless EXP=NEXP. The key ideas of our proof are to use perturbation theory to reduce the QMA(2)-complete Separable Sparse Hamiltonian problem to a variant of the Separable Local Hamiltonian problem with an exponentially small promise gap, and then to decide this instance using epsilon-net methods. Our results imply an exponential time algorithm for the Pure State N…
All communication channels are at bottom quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics contributes both obstacles to communication in the form of noise, and opportunities in the use of intrinsically quantum representations for information. This paper investigates the trade-off between power and communication rate for coupled quantum channels. By exploiting quantum correlations such as entanglement, coupled quantum channels can communicate at a potentially higher rate than unentangled quantum channels given the same power. In particular, given the same overall power, M coupled, entangled quantum channe…
We analyze the role of entanglement among probes and with external ancillas in quantum metrology. In the absence of noise, it is known that unentangled sequential strategies can achieve the same Heisenberg scaling of entangled strategies and that external ancillas are useless. This changes in the presence of noise: here we prove that entangled strategies can have higher precision than unentangled ones and that the addition of passive external ancillas can also increase the precision. We analyze some specific noise models and use the results to conjecture a general hierarchy for quantum metrolo…
A quantum illumination protocol exploits correlated light beams to enhance the probability of detection of a partially reflecting object lying in a very noisy background. Recently a simple photon-number-detection based implementation of a quantum illumination-like scheme has been provided in [Lopaeva {\it et al,}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 101}, 153603 (2013)] where the enhancement is preserved despite the loss of non-classicality. In the present paper we investigate the source for quantum advantage in that realization. We introduce an effective two-mode description of the light sources and analyz…
High-precision gyroscopes are a key component of inertial navigation systems. By considering matter wave gyroscopes that make use of entanglement it should be possible to gain some advantages in terms of sensitivity, size, and resources used over unentangled optical systems. In this paper we consider the details of such a quantum-enhanced atom interferometry scheme based on atoms trapped in a carefully-chosen rotating trap. We consider all the steps: entanglement generation, phase imprinting, and read-out of the signal and show that quantum enhancement should be possible in principle. While th…
Classical reinforcement learning (RL) has generated excellent results in different regions; however, its sample inefficiency remains a critical issue. In this paper, we provide concrete numerical evidence that the sample efficiency (the speed of convergence) of quantum RL could be better than that of classical RL, and for achieving comparable learning performance, quantum RL could use much (at least one order of magnitude) fewer trainable parameters than classical RL. Specifically, we employ the popular benchmarking environments of RL in the OpenAI Gym, and show that our quantum RL agent conve…
BellQMA protocols are a subclass of multi-prover quantum Merlin-Arthur protocols in which the verifier is restricted to perform nonadaptive,unentangled measurements on the quantum states received from each Merlin. In this paper, we prove that m-clause 3-SAT instances have BellQMA proofs of satisfiability with constant soundness gap, in which O(sqrt(m)polylog(m)) Merlins each send O(log m) qubits to Arthur. Our result answers a question of Aaronson et al., who gave a protocol with similar parameters that used entangled measurements; the analysis of our protocol is significantly simpler than tha…
Violation of Bell Inequality with Unentangled Photons
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL)（马克斯·普朗克光科学研究所）；University of Tuebingen（蒂宾根大学）；Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences（奥地利科学院量子光学与量子信息研究所）；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）
We show that for an m-partite quantum system, there is a ball of radius 2^{-(m/2-1)} in Frobenius norm, centered at the identity matrix, of separable (unentangled) positive semidefinite matrices. This can be used to derive an epsilon below which mixtures of epsilon of any density matrix with 1 - epsilon of the maximally mixed state will be separable. The epsilon thus obtained is exponentially better (in the number of systems) than existing results. This gives a number of qubits below which NMR with standard pseudopure-state preparation techniques can access only unentangled states; with parame…
In this report, we discuss possibilities to detect a signal at the target from the quantum illumination protocol, that could serve as a quantum radar. We assume a simple universal detecting schema on the target and study if it is possible to discover the quantum illumination measurement and in what conditions considering the microwave regime. Assuming many simplifications, we found that the possibility or the advantage of the detection of the quantum illumination measurement strongly depends on the realization of the quantum illumination protocol.
We address the problem of discriminating with minimal error probability two given quantum operations. We show that the use of entangled input states generally improves the discrimination. For Pauli channels we provide a complete comparison of the optimal strategies where either entangled or unentangled input states are used.
In this brief note, I clarify the crucial differences between three different protocols of quantum channel discrimination, after some confusion has appeared in recent literature.
A simple feedback scheme can be used to operate efficiently a microwave-quantum-illumination device based on electro-optomechanical systems also in regimes in which excess dissipation would, otherwise, prevent to outperform the optimal classical illumination protocol with the same transmitted energy.
Quantum illumination permits Alice and Bob to communicate at 50 Mbit/s over 50 km of low-loss fiber with error probability less than 10^(-6) while the optimum passive eavesdropper's error probability must exceed 0.28.
Quantum illumination is the task of determining the presence of an object in a noisy environment. We determine the optimal continuous variable states for quantum illumination in the limit of zero object reflectivity. We prove that the optimal single mode state is a coherent state, while the optimal two mode state is the two-mode squeezed-vacuum state. We find that these probes are not optimal at non-zero reflectivity, but remain near optimal. This demonstrates the viability of the continuous variable platform for an experimentally accessible, near optimal quantum illumination implementation.
Discriminating between quantum states is a fundamental problem in quantum information protocols. The optimum approach saturates the Helstrom bound, which quantifies the unavoidable error probability of mistaking one state for another. Computing the error probability directly requires complete knowledge and diagonalization of the density matrices describing these states. Both of these fundamental requirements become impractically difficult to obtain as the dimension of the states grow large. In this article, we analyze quantum illumination as a quantum channel discrimination protocol and circum…
The benefits of entanglement can outlast entanglement itself. In quantum illumination, entanglement is employed to better detect reflecting objects in environments so noisy that all entanglement is destroyed. Here, we show that quantum discord - a more resilient form of quantum correlations - explains the resilience of quantum illumination. We introduce a quantitative relation between the performance gain in quantum illumination and the amount of discord used to encode information about the presence or absence of a reflecting object. This highlights discord's role preserving the benefits of en…
Superposition and entanglement, the quintessential characteristics of quantum physics, have been shown to provide communication, computation, and sensing capabilities that go beyond what classical physics will permit. It is natural, therefore, to explore their application to radar, despite the fact that decoherence---caused by the loss and noise encountered in radar sensing---destroys these fragile quantum properties. This paper tells the story of "quantum illumination", an entanglement-based approach to quantum radar, from its inception to its current understanding. Remarkably, despite loss a…
It is well-known that quantum illumination with a two-mode squeezed vacuum state as an initial entangled bipartite state achieves $6$ dB quantum advantage in the error probability compared to classical coherent-state illumination. Is entanglement the only resource responsible for the quantum advantage? We explore this question by making use of squeezing operations. Finally, we conclude that the answer to the question is negative.
We propose to realize microwave quantum illumination in weak coupling regime based on multimode optomechanical systems. In our proposal the multimode together with a frequency-mismatch process could reduce mechanical thermal noise. Therefore, we achieve a significant reduction of error probability than conventional detector in weak coupling regime. Moreover, we optimize the signal-to-noise ratio for limited bandwidth by tuning the delay time of entangled wave-packets.
We present the first experimental realisation of the quantum illumination protocol proposed in Ref.s [S. Lloyd, Science 321, 1463 (2008); S. Tan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 253601 (2008)], achieved in a simple feasible experimental scheme based on photon-number correlations. A main achievement of our result is the demonstration of a strong robustness of the quantum protocol to noise and losses, that challenges some widespread wisdom about quantum technologies.
Quantum illumination is a quantum-optical sensing technique in which an entangled source is exploited to improve the detection of a low-reflectivity object that is immersed in a bright thermal background. Entangled sources between microwave and optical fields can be exploited to improve detection in microwave quantum illumination technique. We proposed a scheme to enhance the entanglement between the output fields of microwave and optical cavity by introducing optical parametric amplifier medium in cavity optomechanical system. We show that improving signal-to-noise ratio and decreasing error …
The quantum illumination is examined by making use of the three-mode maximally entangled Gaussian state, which involves one signal and two idler beams. It is shown that the quantum Bhattacharyya bound between $ρ$ (state for target absence) and $σ$ (state for target presence) is less than the previous result derived by two-mode Gaussian state when $N_S$, average photon number per signal, is less than $0.295$. This indicates that the quantum illumination with three-mode Gaussian state gives less error probability compared to that with two-mode Gaussian state when $N_S < 0.295$.
We find a tight upper bound for the classical capacity of quantum thermal noise channels that is within $1/\ln 2$ bits of Holevo's lower bound. This lower bound is achievable using unentangled, classical signal states, namely displaced coherent states. Thus, we find that while quantum tricks might offer benefits, when it comes to classical communication they can only help a bit.
Proofs of the quantum advantage available in imaging or detecting objects under quantum illumination can rely on optimal measurements without specifying what they are. We use the continuous-variable Gaussian quantum information formalism to show that quantum illumination is better for object detection compared with coherent states of the same mean photon number, even for simple direct photodetection. The advantage persists if signal energy and object reflectivity are low and background thermal noise is high. The advantage is even greater if we match signal beam detection probabilities rather t…
The advantages of using quantum states of light for object detection are often highlighted in schemes that use simultaneous and optimal measurements. Here, we describe a theoretical but experimentally realizable quantum illumination scheme based on non-simultaneous and non-optimal measurements which can maintain this advantage. In particular, we examine the multi-click heralded two mode squeezed vacuum state as a probe signal in a quantum illumination process. The increase in conditioned signal intensity associated with multi-click heralding is greater than that from a single detector-heralded…
We present a one-shot method for preparing pure entangled states between a sender and a receiver at a minimal cost of entanglement and quantum communication. In the case of preparing unentangled states, an earlier paper showed that a 2n-qubit quantum state could be communicated to a receiver by physically transmitting only n+o(n) qubits in addition to consuming n ebits of entanglement and some shared randomness. When the states to be prepared are entangled, we find that there is a reduction in the number of qubits that need to be transmitted, interpolating between no communication at all for m…
A quantum receiver is an essential element of quantum illumination (QI) which outperforms its classical counterpart, called classical-illumination (CI). However, there are only few proposals for realizable quantum receiver, which exploits nonlinear effects leading to increasing the complexity of receiver setups. To compensate this, in this article, we design a quantum receiver with linear optical elements for Gaussian QI. Rather than exploiting nonlinear effect, our receiver consists of a 50:50 beam splitter and homodyne detection. Using double homodyne detection after the 50:50 beam splitter,…
A minimally-invasive way to detect the presence of a stealth target is to probe it with a single photon and analyze the reflected signals. The efficiency of such a conventional detection scheme can potentially be enhanced by the method of quantum illumination, where entanglement is exploited to break the classical limits. The question is, what is the optimal quantum state that allows us to achieve the detection limit with a minimal error? Here we address this question for discrete signals, by deriving a complete and general set of analytic solutions for the whole parameter space, which can be …
Quantum-enhanced sensing has a goal of enhancing a parameter sensitivity with input quantum states, while quantum illumination has a goal of enhancing a target detection capability with input entangled states in a heavy noise environment. Here we propose a concatenation between quantum-enhanced sensing and quantum illumination that can take quantum advantage over the classical limit. First, phase sensing in an interferometry is connected to a target sensing via quantum Fisher information. Second, the target sensitivity is investigated in noisy quantum-enhanced sensing. Under the same input sta…
The class QMA(k), introduced by Kobayashi et al., consists of all languages that can be verified using k unentangled quantum proofs. Many of the simplest questions about this class have remained embarrassingly open: for example, can we give any evidence that k quantum proofs are more powerful than one? Does QMA(k)=QMA(2) for k>=2? Can QMA(k) protocols be amplified to exponentially small error? In this paper, we make progress on all of the above questions. First, we give a protocol by which a verifier can be convinced that a 3SAT formula of size n is satisfiable, with constant soundness, given …
In this work, a theoretical generalization of Lloyd's quantum illumination to signal beams described by two entangled photon states is developed. It is shown that the new protocol offers a method to find the range of the target, reduces the size of the required time-bandwidth product to have the same signal to noise ratio than in Lloyd's quantum illumination, has a lower probability of false positive and is resilient against noise and also potentially against losses. However, the generation of the required three photon states for the protocol posses a technical problem for its practical implem…
We cast the problem of illuminating an object in a noisy environment into a communication protocol. A probe is sent into the environment, and the presence or absence of the object constitutes a signal encoded on the probe. The probe is then measured to decode the signal. We calculate the Holevo information and bounds to the accessible information between the encoded and received signal with two different Gaussian probes---an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) state and a coherent state. We also evaluate the Gaussian discord consumed during the encoding process with the EPR probe. We find that the H…
Quantum illumination employs entangled states to detect a weakly reflective target in a thermal bath. The performance of a given entangled state is evaluated from the minimum error probability in the asymptotic limit, which is compared against the optimal coherent state scheme. We derive an upper bound as well as a lower bound on the asymptotic minimum error probability, as functions of the quantum Fisher information. The upper bound can be achieved using a repetitive local strategy. This allows us to compare the optimal performance of definite-photon-number entangled states against that of th…
Quantum illumination (QI) is a quantum sensing protocol mainly for target detection which uses entangled signal-idler photon pairs to enhance the detection efficiency of low-reflectivity objects immersed in thermal noisy environments. Especially, due to the naturally occurring background radiation, the photon emitted toward potential targets more appropriately lies in the microwave region. Here, we propose a hybrid quantum source based on cavity magnonics for microwave QI, where the medium that bridges the optical and the microwave modes is magnon, the quanta of spin wave. Within experimentall…
Implementation of high-speed quantum key distribution~(QKD) has become one of the major focus in the field, which produces high key-generation rate for applications. To achieve high-speed QKD, tailored techniques are developed and employed to quickly generate and detect quantum states. However, these techniques may introduce unique loopholes to compromise the security of QKD systems. In this paper, we investigate the loopholes of self-differencing~(SD) avalanche photodiode~(APD) detector, typically used for high-speed detection in a QKD system, and demonstrate experimental testing of SD APD de…
