It is often argued that entanglement is at the root of the speedup for quantum compared to classical computation, and that one needs a sufficient amount of entanglement for this speedup to be manifest. In measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC), the need for a highly entangled initial state is particularly obvious. Defying this intuition, we show that quantum states can be too entangled to be useful for the purpose of computation. We prove that this phenomenon occurs for a dramatic majority of all states: the fraction of useful n-qubit pure states is less than exp(-n^2). Computational universality is hence a rare property in quantum states. This work highlights a new aspect of the question concerning the role entanglement plays for quantum computational speed-ups. The statements remain true if one allows for certain forms of post-selection and also cover the notion of CQ-universality. We identify scale-invariant states resulting from a MERA construction as likely candidates for physically relevant states subject to this effect.
The question whether all entangled states can be used as a nonclassical resource has remained open so far. Here we provide a conclusive answer to this problem for the case of systems shared by two parties. We show that any entangled state $σ$ can enhance the teleportation power of some other state. This holds even if the state $σ$ is bound entangled.
We prove that every entangled state is useful as a resource for the problem of minimum-error channel discrimination. More specifically, given a single copy of an arbitrary bipartite entangled state, it holds that there is an instance of a quantum channel discrimination task for which this state allows for a correct discrimination with strictly higher probability than every separable state.
We solve the problem of the optimal cloning of pure entangled two-qubit states with a fixed degree of entanglement using local operations and classical communication. We show, that amazingly, classical communication between the parties can improve the fidelity of local cloning if and only if the initial entanglement is higher than a certain critical value. It is completely useless for weakly entangled states. We also show that bound entangled states with positive partial transpose are not useful as a resource to improve the best local cloning fidelity.
It is well known that one can extract all the information of an unknown quantum channel by means of quantum process tomography, such as standard quantum-process tomography and ancilla-assisted quantum process tomography (AAQPT). Furthermore, it has been shown that entanglement is not necessary for AAQPT, there exist separable states which are also useful for it. Surprisingly, in this work we find that not all entangled states are useful for AAQPT, there also exist some entangled states which are useless. The realignment operation used in entanglement detection can be related to the question wh…
The problem of the estimation of multiple phases (or of commuting unitaries) is considered. This is a sub-model of the estimation of a completely unknown unitary operation where it has been shown in recent works that there are considerable improvements by using entangled input states and entangled measurements. Here it is shown that when estimating commuting unitaries, there is practically no advantage in using entangled input states or entangled measurements.
Measurement based quantum computation requires the generation of a cluster state (quantum resource) prior to starting a computation. Generation of this entangled state can be difficult with many schemes already proposed. We present an abstract scheme which can create 2D cluster states as a universal resource for quantum computing. We find a linear scaling of grid size with cluster depth. The scheme is also capable of creating more exotic topologies including 3D structures and the unit cell for topological error correction. We note its relevance to the cavity QED scheme in [30] although it coul…
Nonlocal correlations are useful for device independent (DI) randomness certification [Nature (London) {\bf 464}, 1021 (2010)]. The advantage of this DI protocol over the conventional quantum protocol is that randomness can be certified even when experimental apparatuses are not trusted. Quantum entanglement is the necessary physical source for the nonlocal correlation required for such DI task. However, nonlocality and entanglement are distinct concepts. There exist entangled states which produce no nonlocal correlation and hence are not useful for the DI randomness certification task. Here w…
We investigate the connection between the shot-noise limit in linear interferometers and particle entanglement. In particular, we ask whether or not sub shot-noise sensitivity can be reached with all pure entangled input states of $N$ particles if they can be optimized with local operations. Results on the optimal local transformations allow us to show that for $N=2$ all pure entangled states can be made useful for sub shot-noise interferometry while for $N>2$ this is not the case. We completely classify the useful entangled states available in a bosonic two-mode interferometer. We apply our r…
We study maximally entangled states and fully entangled fraction in general d'\otimes d (d'\geq d) systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions for maximally entangled pure and mixed states are presented. As a natural generalization of the usual fully entangled fraction for d\otimes d systems, we define the maximal overlap between a given quantum state and the maximally entangled states as the fully entangled fraction in d'\otimes d systems. The properties of this fully entangled fraction and its relations to quantum teleportation have been analyzed. The witness for detecting maximally entangl…
We show that the secant variety of the Segre variety gives useful information about the geometrical structure of an arbitrary multipartite quantum system. In particular, we investigate the relation between arbitrary bipartite and three-partite entangled states and this secant variety. We also discuss the geometry of an arbitrary general multipartite state.
We consider a scenario where a party, say, Alice prepares a pure two-qubit (either maximally entangled or non-maximally entangled) state and sends one half of this state to another distant party, say, Bob through a qubit (either unital or non-unital) channel. Finally, the shared state is used as a teleportation channel. In this scenario, we focus on characterizing the set of qubit channels with respect to the final state's efficacy as a resource of quantum teleportation (QT) in terms of maximal average fidelity and fidelity deviation (fluctuation in fidelity values over the input states). Impo…
We suggest an entanglement purification scheme for mixed entangled coherent states using 50-50 beam splitters and photodetectors. This scheme is directly applicable for mixed entangled coherent states of the Werner type, and can be useful for general mixed states using additional nonlinear interactions. We apply our scheme to entangled coherent states decohered in a vacuum environment and find the decay time until which they can be purified.
Multi-dimensional entangled states have been proven to be more powerful in some quantum information process. In this paper, down-converted photons from spontaneous parametric down conversion(SPDC) are used to engineer multi-dimensional entangled states. A kind of multi-degree multi-dimensional Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger(GHZ) state can also be generated. The hyper-entangled photons, which are entangled in energy-time, polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM), is proved to be useful to increase the dimension of systems and investigate higher-dimensional entangled states.
The usefulness of the genuinely entangled six qubit state that was recently introduced by Borras et al. is investigated for the quantum teleportation of an arbitrary three qubit state and for quantum state sharing (QSTS) of an arbitrary two qubit state. For QSTS, we explicitly devise two protocols and construct sixteen orthogonal measurement basis which can lock an arbitrary two qubit information between two parties.
The majorization relation has been shown to be useful in classifying which transformations of jointly held quantum states are possible using local operations and classical communication. In some cases, a direct transformation between two states is not possible, but it becomes possible in the presence of another state (known as a catalyst); this situation is described mathematically by the trumping relation, an extension of majorization. The structure of the trumping relation is not nearly as well understood as that of majorization. We give an introduction to this subject and derive some new re…
We experimentally demonstrate a general criterion to identify entangled states useful for the estimation of an unknown phase shift with a sensitivity higher than the shot-noise limit. We show how to exploit this entanglement on the examples of a maximum likelihood as well as of a Bayesian phase estimation protocol. Using an entangled four-photon state we achieve a phase sensitivity clearly beyond the shot-noise limit. Our detailed comparison of methods and quantum states for entanglement enhanced metrology reveals the connection between multiparticle entanglement and sub-shot-noise uncertainty…
We consider bipartite entangled states that cannot outperform separable states in any linear interferometer. Then, we show that these states can still be more useful metrologically than separable states if several copies of the state are provided or an ancilla is added to the quantum system. We present a general method to find the local Hamiltonian for which a given quantum state performs the best compared to separable states. We obtain analytically the optimal Hamiltonian for some quantum states with a high symmetry. We show that all bipartite entangled pure states outperform separable states…
Hybrid entangled states exhibit entanglement between different degrees of freedom of a particle pair and thus could be useful for asymmetric optical quantum network where the communication channels are characterized by different properties. We report the first experimental realization of hybrid polarization-orbital angular momentum (OAM) entangled states by adopting a spontaneous parametric down conversion source of polarization entangled states and a polarization-OAM transferrer. The generated quantum states have been characterized through quantum state tomography. Finally, the violation of B…
We experimentally generate and tomographically characterize a mixed, genuinely non-Gaussian bipartite continuous-variable entangled state. By testing entanglement in 2$\times$2-dimensional two-qubit subspaces, entangled qubits are localized within the density matrix, which, firstly, proves the distillability of the state and, secondly, is useful to estimate the efficiency and test the applicability of distillation protocols. In our example, the entangled qubits are arranged in the density matrix in an asymmetric way, i.e. entanglement is found between diverse qubits composed of different photo…
Entangled coherent states are useful for various applications in quantum information processing but they are are sensitive to loss. We propose a scheme to generate distributed entangled coherent states over a lossy environment in such a way that the fidelity is independent of the losses at detectors heralding the generation of the entanglement. We compare our scheme with a previous one for the same purpose [Ourjoumtsev {\em et al.}, Nat. Phys. {\bf 5} 189 (2009)] and find parameters for which our new scheme results in superior performance.
We explicate conditions under which, the two magnon state becomes highly entangled and is useful for several quantum communication protocols. This state, which is experimentally realizable in quantum dots using Heisenberg exchange interaction, is found to be suitable for carrying out deterministic teleportation of an arbitrary two qubit composite system. Further, conditions for which the channel capacity reaches "Holevo bound", allowing maximal amount of classical information to be encoded, are derived. Later, an explicit protocol for the splitting and sharing of a two qubit entangled state am…
A recent paper (Phys. Rev. A 86, 034305 (2012)) proposed an entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for less-entangled $N$-atom GHZ state with the help of the photonic Faraday rotation. It is shown that the maximally entangled atom state can be distilled from two pairs of less-entangled atom states. In this paper, we put forward an improved ECP for arbitrary less-entangled N-atom GHZ state with only one pair of less-entangled atom state, one auxiliary atom and one auxiliary photon. Moreover, our ECP can be used repeatedly to obtain a higher success probability. If consider the practical oper…
The concatenated Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (C-GHZ) state is a new type of multipartite entangled state, which has potential application in future quantum information. In this paper, we propose a protocol of constructing arbitrary C-GHZ entangled state approximatively. Different from the previous protocols, each logic is encoded in the coherent state. This protocol is based on the linear optics, which is feasible in experimental technology. This protocol may be useful in quantum information based on the C-GHZ state.
We study the problem of locally distinguishing pure quantum states using shared entanglement as a resource. For a given set of locally indistinguishable states, we define a resource state to be useful if it can enhance local distinguishability and optimal if it can distinguish the states as well as global measurements and is also minimal with respect to a partial ordering defined by entanglement and dimension. We present examples of useful resources and show that an entangled state need not be useful for distinguishing a given set of states. We obtain optimal resources with explicit local prot…
We compare effects of decoherence and detection inefficiency on entangled coherent states (ECSs) and entangled photon pairs (EPPs), both of which are known to be particularly useful for quantum information processing (QIP). When decoherence effects caused by photon losses are heavy, the ECSs outperform the EPPs as quantum channels for teleportation both in fidelities and in success probabilities. On the other hand, when inefficient detectors are used, the teleportation scheme using the ECSs suffers undetected errors that result in the degradation of fidelity, while this is not the case for the…
To acquire the best path-entangled photon Fock states for robust quantum optical metrology with parity detection, we calculate phase information from a lossy interferometer by using twin entangled Fock states. We show that (a) when loss is less than 50% twin entangled Fock states with large photon number difference give higher visibility while when loss is higher than 50% the ones with less photon number difference give higher visibility; (b) twin entangled Fock states with large photon number difference give sub-shot-noise limit sensitivity for phase detection in a lossy environment. This res…
When basic tools of quantum information are applied to the quantum tomography data presented in Nature 439, 179 (2006), none of their devices appears to be a source of entangled photons.
We present a review of the problem of finding out whether a quantum state of two or more parties is entangled or separable. After a formal definition of entangled states, we present a few criteria for identifying entangled states and introduce some entanglement measures. We also provide a classification of entangled states with respect to their usefulness in quantum dense coding, and present some aspects of multipartite entanglement.
We design a series of quantum circuits that generate absolute maximally entangled (AME) states to benchmark a quantum computer. A relation between graph states and AME states can be exploited to optimize the structure of the circuits and minimize their depth. Furthermore, we find that most of the provided circuits obey majorization relations for every partition of the system, and at every step of the quantum computation. The rational for our approach is to benchmark quantum computers with maximal useful entanglement, which can be used to implement multipartite quantum protocols.
The paper discusses coordination games with remote players that have access to an entangled quantum state. It shows that the entangled state cannot be used by players for communicating information, but that in certain games it can be used for improving coordination of actions. A necessary condition is provided that helps to determine when an entangled quantum state can be useful for improving coordination.
We investigate the usefulness of different classes of genuine quadripartite entangled states as quantum resources for teleportation and superdense coding. We examine the possibility of teleporting unknown one, two and three qubit states. We show that one can use the teleportation protocol to send any general one and two qubit states. A restricted class of three qubit states can also be faithfully teleported. We also explore superdense coding protocol in single-receiver and multi-receiver scenarios. We show that there exist genuine quadripartite entangled states that can be used to transmit fou…
Entanglement of remote atom lasers is obtained via quantum state transfer technique from lights to matter waves in a five-level $M$-type system. The considered atom-atom collisions can yield an effective Kerr susceptibility for this system and lead to the self- and cross- phase modulation between the two output atom lasers. This effect results in generation of entangled states of output fields. Particularly, under different conditions of space-dependent control fields, the entanglement of atom lasers and of atom-light fields can be obtained, respectively. Furthermore, based on the Bell-state m…
We propose two efficient entanglement concentration protocols (ECPs) for arbitrary less-entangled single-photon entanglement (SPE). Different from all the previous ECPs, these protocols not only can obtain the maximally SPE, but also can protect the single qubit information encoded in the polarization degree of freedom. These protocols only require one pair of less-entangled single-photon entangled state and some auxiliary single photons, which makes them economical. The first ECP is operated with the linear optical elements, which can be realized in current experiment. The second ECP adopts t…
We introduce a simple sufficient criterion, which allows one to tell whether a subspace of a bipartite or multipartite Hilbert space is entangled. The main ingredient of our criterion is a bound on the minimal entanglement of a subspace in terms of entanglement of vectors spanning that subspace expressed for geometrical measures of entanglement. The criterion is applicable to both completely and genuinely entangled subspaces. We explore its usefulness in several important scenarios. Further, an entanglement criterion for mixed states following directly from the condition is stated. As an auxil…
Encoding the imaginary part of a weak value onto an initially entangled probe can modify its entanglement content - provided the probe observable can distinguish between states of different entropies. Apart from fundamental interest, this result illustrates the utility of the imaginary weak value as a calculational tool in certain entanglement concentration protocols.
A frequency-multiplexed entangled photon pair and a high-dimensional hyperentangled photon pair are useful to realize a high-capacity quantum communication. A biphoton frequency comb (BFC) with entanglement can be used to prepare both states. We demonstrate polarization entangled BFCs with over 1400 frequency modes, which is approximately two orders of magnitude larger than those of earlier entangled BFCs, by placing a singly resonant periodically poled LiNbO3 waveguide resonator within a Sagnac loop. The BFCs are demonstrated by measuring the joint spectral intensity, cross-correlation, and a…
The standard benchmark for teleportation is the average fidelity of teleportation and according to this benchmark not all states are useful for teleportation. It was recently shown however that all entangled states lead to non-classical teleportation, with there being no classical scheme able to reproduce the states teleported to Bob. Here we study the operational significance of this result. On the one hand we demonstrate that every entangled state is useful for teleportation if a generalization of the average fidelity of teleportation is considered which concerns teleporting quantum correlat…
We study a general corresponding principle between discrete-variable quantum states and continuous-variable (especially, restricted on Gaussian) states via quantum purification method. In the previous work, we have already investigated an information-theoretic correspondence between the Gaussian maximally mixed states (GMMSs) and their purifications known as Gaussian maximally entangled states (GMESs) in [Phys. Lett. A {\bf 380}, 3607 (2016)]. We here compare an $N\times N$-dimensional maximally entangled state to the GMES we proposed previously, through an explicit calculation of quantum fide…
We propose a particular encoding for bipartite entangled states derived from multipartite cluster-type entangled coherent states (CTECSs). We investigate the effects of amplitude damping on the entanglement content of this bipartite state, as well as its usefulness as a quantum channel for teleportation. We find interesting relationships among the amplitude of the coherent states constituting the CTECSs, the number of subsystems forming the logical qubits (redundancy), and the extent to which amplitude damping affects the entanglement of the channel. For instance, in the sense of sudden death …
Linear maps of matrices describing evolution of density matrices for a quantum system initially entangled with another are identified and found to be not always completely positive. They can even map a positive matrix to a matrix that is not positive, unless we restrict the domain on which the map acts. Nevertheless, their form is similar to that of completely positive maps. Only some minus signs are inserted in the operator-sum representation. Each map is the difference of two completely positive maps. The maps are first obtained as maps of mean values and then as maps of basis matrices. Thes…
We present an optimal entanglement concentration ECP for an arbitrary less-entangled W state. By two of the parties say Alice and Charlie performing one parity check measurements, they can obtain the maximally entangled W state with a certain probability. Otherwise, they can obtain another lesser-entangled W state with another probability, which can be used to reconcentrated into a maximally entangled W state. By iterating this ECP several times, it has the maximal success probability. This ECP maybe an optimal one and is useful in current quantum information processing.
We report the generation of polarization-entangled photons by femtosecond-pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a cascade of two type-I crystals. Highly entangled pulsed states were obtained by introducing a temporal delay between the two orthogonal polarization components of the pump field. They exhibited high-visibility quantum interference and a large concurrence value, without the need of post-selection using narrow-bandwidth-spectral filters. The results are well explained by the theory which incorporates the space-time dependence of interfering two-photon amplitudes if d…
We demonstrate a novel scheme to generate frequency-entangled qudits with dimension number higher than 10 and to distribute them over optical fibers of 15 km in total length. This scheme combines the technique of spectral engineering of biphotons generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and the technique of spectrally resolved Hong-Ou-Mandel interference. We characterized the comb-like spectral correlation structures of the qudits by time of arrival measurement and correlated spectral intensity measurement. The generation and distribution of the distinct entangled frequency modes ma…
A quantum communication network can be constructed by distributing a multipartite entangled state to space-separated nodes. Entangled optical beams with highest flying speed and measurable brightness can be used as carriers to convey information in quantum communication networks. Losses and noises existing in real communication channels will reduce or even totally destroy entanglement. The phenomenon of disentanglement will result in the complete failure of quantum communication. Here, we present the experimental demonstrations on the disentanglement and the entanglement revival of tripartite …
Entanglement is a resource in quantum information theory when state manipulation is restricted to Local Operations assisted by Classical Communication (LOCC). It is therefore of paramount importance to decide which LOCC transformations are possible and, particularly, which states are maximally useful under this restriction. While the bipartite maximally entangled state is well known (it is the only state that cannot be obtained from any other and, at the same time, it can be transformed to any other by LOCC), no such state exists in the multipartite case. In order to cope with this fact, we in…
We put forward two efficient entanglement concentration protocols (ECPs) for distilling the maximally entangled NOON state from arbitrary less-entangled NOON state with only an auxiliary single photon. With the help of the weak cross-Kerr nonlinearities, both the two ECPs can be used repeatedly to get a high success probability. In the first ECP, the auxiliary single photon should be shared by the two parties say Alice and Bob. In the second ECP, the auxiliary single photon is only possessed by Bob, which can greatly increase the practical success probability by avoiding the transmission loss.…
Quantum entanglement offers the possibility of making measurements beyond the classical limit, however some issues still need to be overcome before it can be applied in realistic lossy systems. Recent work has used the quantum Fisher information (QFI) to show that entangled coherent states (ECSs) may be useful for this purpose as they combine sub-classical phase precision capabilities with robustness (Joo et al., 2011). However, to date no effective scheme for measuring a phase in lossy systems using an ECS has been devised. Here we present a scheme that does just this. We show how one could m…
We demonstrate that non-linear entanglement witnesses can be made particularly useful for entanglement detection in hyper-entangled or multilevel states. We test this idea experimentally on the platform of linear optics using a hyper-entangled state of two photons. Instead of several simultaneous copies of two-photon entangled states, one can directly measure the witness on single copy of a hyper-entangled state. Our results indicate that hyper-entanglement can be used for quick entanglement detection and it provides a practical testbed for experiments with non-linear entanglement witnesses.
The bound entangled state carries noisy entanglement and it is very hard to distill but the usefulness of bound entangled states has been depicted in different applications. This article represents a comparative dynamical study of an open quantum system for one of the bound entangled states proposed by Bennett et al. The study is conducted under the influence of Heisenberg, bi-linear bi-quadratic and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. During the study, an auxiliary qutrit interacts with one of the qutrits of the selected two qutrit bound entangled state through different interactions. The…
The entanglement phenomenon on example of Smolin state of four qubits is discussed. This state is known as bound entangled state and the spin tomogram of the state is found in explicit form. The qubit portrait method is used the Bell inequality violation which provides another tool to prove the property of entanglement of the four-qubit state under consideration.
Reliable quantum communication/processing links between modules are a necessary building block for various quantum processing architectures. Here we consider a spin chain system with alternating strength couplings and containing three defects, that impose three domain walls between topologically distinct regions of the chain. We show that -- in addition to its useful, high fidelity, quantum state transfer properties -- an entangling protocol can be implemented in this system, with optional localisation and storage of the entangled states. We demonstrate both numerically and analytically that, …
Multiplexed quantum memories capable of storing and processing entangled photons are essential for the development of quantum networks. In this context, we demonstrate the simultaneous storage and retrieval of two entangled photons inside a solid-state quantum memory and measure a temporal multimode capacity of ten modes. This is achieved by producing two polarization entangled pairs from parametric down conversion and mapping one photon of each pair onto a rare-earth-ion doped (REID) crystal using the atomic frequency comb (AFC) protocol. We develop a concept of indirect entanglement witnesse…
We propose to realize the two-mode continuous-variable entanglement of microwave photons in an electro-optic system, consisting of two superconducting microwave resonators and one or two optical cavities filled with certain electro-optic medium. The cascaded and parallel schemes realize such entanglement via coherent control on the dynamics of the system, while the dissipative dynamical scheme utilizes the reservoir-engineering approach and exploits the optical dissipation as a useful resource. We show that, for all the schemes, the amount of entanglement is determined by the ratio of the effe…
