We explore procedures to detect entanglement of unknown mixed states, which can be experimentally viable. The heart of the method is a hierarchy of simple feasibility problems, which provides sufficient conditions to entanglement. Our numerical investigations indicate that the entanglement is detected with a cost which is much lower than full state tomography. The procedure is applicable to both free and bound entanglement, and involves only single copy measurements.
An entanglement concentration scheme for unknown atomic entanglement states is proposed via entanglement swapping in cavity QED. Because the interaction used here is a large-detuned one between two driven atoms and a quantized cavity mode, the effects of the cavity decay and thermal field have been eliminated. These advantages can warrant the experimental feasibility of the current scheme.
We explore the possibility of entanglement detection in continuous variable systems by entanglement witnesses based on covariance matrices, constructible from random homodyne measurements. We propose new linear constraints characterizing the entanglement witnesses based on second moments, and use them in a semidefinite program providing the optimal entanglement test for given random measurements. We test the method on the class of squeezed vacuum states and study the efficiency of entanglement detection in general unknown covariance matrices.
Quantum entangled states have shown distinguished features beyond any classical state. Many methods like quantum state tomography have been presented to verify entanglement. In this work, we aim to identify unknown entanglements with partial information of the state space by developing a nonlinear entanglement witness. The witness consists of a generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-like paradox expressed by Pauli observables, and a nonlinear inequality expressed by density matrix elements. First, we verify unknown bipartite entanglements and study the robustness of entanglement witnesses aga…
In quantum information theory, the reliable and effective detection of entanglement is of paramount importance. However, given an unknown state, assessing its entanglement is a challenging task. To attack this problem, we investigate the use of random local measurements, from which entanglement witnesses are then constructed via semidefinite programming methods. We propose a scheme of successively increasing the number of measurements until the presence of entanglement can be unambiguously concluded, and investigate its performance in various examples.
Quantum entanglement plays a crucial role in quantum information processing tasks and quantum mechanics, hence quantifying unknown entanglement is a fundamental task. However, this is also challenging, as entanglement cannot be measured by any observables directly. In this paper, we train neural networks to quantify unknown entanglement, where the input features of neural networks are the outcome statistics data produced by locally measuring target quantum states, and the training labels are well-chosen quantities. For bipartite quantum states, this quantity is coherent information, which is a…
An entanglement purification scheme for arbitrary unknown(mixed and pure non-maximally) entangled ionic states is proposed by using linear optical elements. The main advantage of the scheme is that not only two-ion maximally entangled pairs but also four-ion maximally entangled pairs can be extracted from the less entangled pairs. The scheme is within current technology.
We give an introduction to Gaussian states and operations. A discussion of the entanglement properties of bipartite Gaussian states in terms of its covariance matrix follows. It is explained how entanglement can be witnessed using feasible measurements, e.g. homodyne measurements. We find that the outcome of such a measurements cannot only witness but also quantify entanglement.
We propose a scheme for both distilling and quantifying entanglement, applicable to individual copies of an arbitrary unknown two-qubit state. It is realized in a usual two-qubit interferometry with local filtering. Proper filtering operation for the maximal distillation of the state is achieved, by erasing single-qubit interference, and then the concurrence of the state is determined directly from the visibilities of two-qubit interference. We compare the scheme with full state tomography.
The high-precision interferometric measurement of an unknown phase is the basis for metrology in many areas of science and technology. Quantum entanglement provides an increase in sensitivity, but present techniques have only surpassed the limits of classical interferometry for the measurement of small variations about a known phase. Here we introduce a technique that combines entangled states with an adaptive algorithm to precisely estimate a completely unspecified phase, obtaining more information per photon that is possible classically. We use the technique to make the first ab initio entan…
Whether entanglement in a state can be detected, distilled, and quantified without full state reconstruction is a fundamental open problem. We demonstrate a new scheme encompassing these three tasks for arbitrary two-qubit entanglement, by constructing the optimal entanglement witness for polarization-entangled mixed-state photon pairs without full state reconstruction. With better efficiency than quantum state tomography, the entanglement is maximally distilled by newly developed tunable polarization filters, and quantified by the expectation value of the witness, which equals the concurrence…
We investigate the practicality of the method proposed by Maciel et al. [Phys. Rev. A. 80, 032325(2009)] for detecting the entanglement of two spatial qutrits (3-dimensional quantum systems), which are encoded in the discrete transverse momentum of single photons transmitted through a multi-slit aperture. The method is based on the acquisition of partial information of the quantum state through projective measurements, and a data processing analysis done with semi-definite programs. This analysis relies on generating gradually an optimal entanglement witness operator, and numerical investigati…
We present the generalized version of Wang's protocol[A.M.Wang, Phys.Rev.A 74,032317 (2006)] for the remote implementation(sometimes referred to as quantum remote control) of partially unknown quantum operations. The protocol only requires no more than half of the entanglements used in Bidirectional Quantum State Teleportation. We also propose a protocol for another form of quantum remote control. It can remotely implement a unitary operation which is a combination of the projective representations of a group. Moreover, we prove that the Schmidt rank of the entanglements cannot not be less tha…
We characterise non-selective global projective measurements capable of increasing quantum entanglement between two particles. We show that non-selective global projective measurements are capable of increasing entanglement between two particles, in particular, entanglement of any pure non-maximally entangled state can be improved in this way (but not of any mixed state) and we provide detailed analysis for two qubits. It is then shown that Markovian open system dynamics can only approximate such measurements, but this approximation converges exponentially fast as illustrated using Araki-Zurek…
Suppose we have an unknown multipartite quantum state, how can we experimentally find out whether it is genuine multipartite entangled or not? Recall that even for a bipartite quantum state whose density matrix is known, it is already NP-Hard to determine whether it is entangled or not. Therefore, it is hard to efficiently solve the above problem generally. However, since genuine multipartite entanglement is such a fundamental concept that plays a crucial role in many-body physics and quantum information processing tasks, finding realistic approaches to certify genuine multipartite entanglemen…
While the detection of entanglement has been proved already to be quite a difficult task, experimental quantification of entanglement is even more challenging. In this work, we derive an analytical lower bound for the concurrence of a bipartite mix quantum state in arbitrary dimension. The lower bound is experimentally implementable in a feasible way, which enabling quantification of entanglement in a broad variety of cases
We propose a more general method for detecting a set of entanglement measures, i.e. negativities, in an \emph{arbitrary} tripartite quantum state by local operations and classical communication. To accomplish the detection task using this method, three observers, Alice, Bob and Charlie, do not need to perform the partial transposition maps by the structural physical approximation; instead, they are only required to collectively measure some functions via three local networks supplemented by a classical communication. With these functions, they are able to determine the set of negativities rela…
We present two efficient schemes which can simultaneously accomplish hyperentanglement concentration and purification for two-photon four-qubit systems in an unknown partially hyperentangled mixed states. The first can correct errors in the polarization entanglement and extract maximal hyperentanglement in polarization and spatial mode with additional partial frequency entanglement. The second uses additional maximal frequency entanglement to purify and concentrate hyperentanglement in polarization and spatial mode deterministically. Both of the two schemes are only based on existing optical d…
We propose practical schemes for concentrating entanglement of a pair of unknown partially entangled Bell states and three-photon W states with cross-Kerr nonlinearity. In the schemes, utilizing local operations and classical communication, two separated parties can obtain one maximally entangled photon pair from two previously shared partially entangled photon pairs, and three separated parties can obtain one maximally entangled three-photon W state and a maximally entangled cluster state from two identical partially entangled three-photon W state with a certain success probability. Finally, …
A concern has been expressed that ``the Jaynes principle can produce fake entanglement'' [R. Horodecki et al., Phys. Rev. A {\bf 59}, 1799 (1999)]. In this paper we discuss the general problem of distilling maximally entangled states from $N$ copies of a bipartite quantum system about which only partial information is known, for instance in the form of a given expectation value. We point out that there is indeed a problem with applying the Jaynes principle of maximum entropy to more than one copy of a system, but the nature of this problem is classical and was discussed extensively by Jaynes. …
Entanglement concentration from many copies of unknown pure states is discussed, and we propose the protocol which not only achieves entropy rate, but also produces the perfect maximally entangled state. Our protocol is induced naturally from symmetry of $n$-tensored pure state, and is optimal for all the protocols which concentrates entanglement from unknown pure states, in the sense of failure probability. In the proof of optimality, the statistical estimation theory plays a key role, for concentrated entanglement gives a natural estimate of the entropy of entanglement.
We present a systematic entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for an arbitrary unknown less-entangled three-photon W state, resorting to the optical property of the quantum-dot spins inside one-sided optical microcavities. In our ECP, the parties obtain not only some three-photon systems in the partially entangled with two unknown parameters when one of the parties picks up the robust odd-parity instance with the parity-check gate (PCG) on his two photons, but also some entangled two-photon systems by keeping the even-parity instance in the first step. By exploiting the above three-photon …
We present optimal measuring strategies for the estimation of the entanglement of unknown two-qubit pure states and of the degree of mixing of unknown single-qubit mixed states, of which N identical copies are available. The most general measuring strategies are considered in both situations, to conclude in the first case that a local, although collective, measurement suffices to estimate entanglement, a non-local property, optimally.
We propose a scheme of continuous-variable reversible telecloning, which broadcast the information of an unknown state without loss from a sender to several spatially separated receivers exploiting multipartite entanglement as quantum channels. In this scheme, quantum information of an unknown state is distributed into $M$ optimal clones and $M-1$ anticlones using $2M$% -partite entanglement. For the perfect quantum information distribution that is optimal cloning, $2M$-partite entanglement is required to be a maximum two-party entanglement. Comparing with the quantum telecloning proposed by L…
Transfer of entanglement and information is studied for quantum teleportation of an unknown entangled state through noisy quantum channels. We find that the quantum entanglement of the unknown state can be lost during the teleportation even when the channel is quantum correlated. We introduce a fundamental parameter of correlation information which dissipates linearly during the teleportation through the noisy channel. Analyzing the transfer of correlation information, we show that the purity of the initial state is important in determining the entanglement of the replica state.
The experimental determination of entanglement is a major goal in the quantum information field. In general the knowledge of the state is required in order to quantify its entanglement. Here we express a lower bound to the robustness of entanglement of a state based only on the measurement of the energy observable and on the calculation of a separability energy. This allows the estimation of entanglement dismissing the knowledge of the state in question.
An initial unknown quantum state can be determined with a single measurement apparatus by letting it interact with an auxiliary, "Ancilla", system as proposed by Allahverdyan, Balian and Nieuwenhuizen [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 120402 (2004)]. In the case of two qubits, this procedure allows to reconstruct the initial state of the qubit of interest S by measuring three commuting observables and therefore by means of a single apparatus, for the total system S + A at a later time. The determinant of the matrix of the linear transformation connecting the measurements of three commuting observables at …
We study the entanglement of formation for arbitrary dimensional bipartite mixed unknown states. Experimentally measurable lower and upper bounds for entanglement of formation are derived.
A bipartite state which is secretly chosen from a finite set of known entangled pure states cannot be immediately useful in standard quantum information processing tasks. To effectively make use of the entanglement contained in this unknown state, we introduce a new way to locally manipulate the original quantum system: either identify the state successfully or distill some pure entanglement. Remarkably, if many copies are available, we show that any finite set of entangled pure states, whatever orthogonal or not, can be locally distinguished in this way, which further implies that pure entang…
Quantum teleportation circumvents the uncertainty principle using dual channels: a quantum one consisting of previously-shared entanglement, and a classical one, together allowing the disembodied transport of an unknown quantum state over distance. It has recently been shown that a classical bit can be counterfactually communicated between two parties in empty space, "Alice" and "Bob". Here, by using our "dual" version of the chained quantum Zeno effect to achieve a counterfactual CNOT gate, we propose the first protocol for transporting an unknown qubit counterfactually, that is without any p…
Like entanglement, quantum discord quantifies the quantum correlations. Unlike entanglement, whose detection is extremely difficult, the quantum discord of an arbitrary bipartite state allows itself to be detected perfectly by a single observable, the quantum discord witness. In particular, we report a single observable whose expectation value provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the vanishing quantum discord of an arbitrary bipartite unknown state with four copies. A quantum circuit is designed to measure the quantum discord witness by using only local qubit-measurements.
We construct a single observable measurement of which mean value on four copies of an {\it unknown} two-qubit state is sufficient for unambiguous decision whether the state is separable or entangled. In other words, there exists a universal collective entanglement witness detecting all two-qubit entanglement. The test is directly linked to a function which characterizes to some extent the entanglement quantitatively. This function is an entanglement monotone under so--called local pure operations and classical communication (pLOCC) which preserve local dimensions. Moreover it provides tight up…
Security of the three-party quantum secret sharing (QSS) schemes based on entanglement and a collective eavesdropping check is analyzed in the case of considerable quantum channel losses. An opaque attack scheme is presented for the dishonest agent to eavesdrop the message obtained by the other agent freely, which reveals that these QSS schemes are insecure for transmission efficiencies lower than 50%, especially when they are used to share an unknown quantum state. Finally, we present a general way to improve the security of QSS schemes for sharing not only a private key but also an unknown q…
We show how entanglement can be used to improve the estimation of an unknown transformation. Using entanglement is always of benefit, in improving either the precision or the stability of the measurement. Examples relevant for applications are illustrated, for either qubits and continuous variables
In this paper, a novel protocol for bidirectional controlled quantum teleportation (BCQT) is proposed. Based on entanglement swapping of initiate Bell state, two users can teleport an unknown single-qubit state to each other under the permission of the supervisor. This proposed protocol would be utilized to a system in which a controller controls the communication in one direction only. Indeed, just one of the users needs the permission of the controller to reconstruct the unknown quantum state. In comparison to the existing BCQT protocols which their quantum channels are cluster and brown sta…
We present observable lower and upper bounds for the entanglement of formation (EOF) and quantum discord (QD), which facilitates estimates of EOF and QD for arbitrary experimental unknown states in finite-dimensional bipartite systems. These bounds can be easily obtained by a few experimental measurements on a twofold copy $\varrho\otimes\varrho$ of the mixed states. Based on our results, we use the experimental measurement data of the real experiment given by Schmid \textit{et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{101}, 260505 (2008)] to obtain the lower and upper bounds of EOF and QD for the experi…
We study the dynamics of a Heisenberg-XY spin chain with an unknown state coded into one qubit or a pair of entangled qubits, with the rest of the spins being in a polarized state. The time evolution involves magnon excitations, and through them the entanglement is transported across the channel. For a large number of qubits, explicit formulae for the concurrences, measures for two-qubit entanglements, and the fidelity for recovering the state some distance away are calculated as functions of time. Initial states with an entangled pair of qubits show better fidelity, which takes its first maxi…
Quantum teleportation with additional a priori information about the input state achieves higher fidelity than teleportation of a completely unknown state. However, perfect teleportation of two non-orthogonal input states requires the same amount of entanglement as perfect teleportation of an unknown state, namely one ebit. We analyse how well two-state teleportation can be achieved using every degree of pure-state entanglement, and discuss the fidelity of `teleportation' that can be achieved with only classical communication but no shared entanglement. A two-state telecloning scheme is constr…
We study the power of measurements implementable with local quantum operations and classical communication (or LOCC measurements for short) in the setting of quantum channel discrimination. More precisely, we consider discrimination procedures that attempt to identify an unknown channel, chosen uniformly from two known alternatives, that take the following form: (i) the input to the unknown channel is prepared in a possibly entangled state with an ancillary system, (ii) the unknown channel is applied to the input system, and (iii) an LOCC measurement is performed on the output and ancillary sy…
The minimum requirements for entanglement detection are discussed for a spin chain in which the spins cannot be individually accessed. The methods presented detect entangled states close to a cluster state and a many-body singlet state, and seem to be viable for experimental realization in optical lattices of two-state bosonic atoms. The entanglement criteria are based on entanglement witnesses and on the uncertainty of collective observables.
Quantum entanglement, after playing a significant role in the development of the foundations of quantum mechanics, has been recently rediscovered as a new physical resource with potential commercial applications such as, for example, quantum cryptography, better frequency standards or quantum-enhanced positioning and clock synchronization. On the mathematical side the studies of entanglement have revealed very interesting connections with the theory of positive maps. The capacity to generate entangled states is one of the basic requirements for building quantum computers. Hence, efficient expe…
Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables tap-proof exchange of cryptographic keys guaranteed by the very laws of physics. One of the last remaining roadblocks on the way towards widespread deployment of QKD is the high loss experienced during terrestrial distribution of photons, which limits the distance between the communicating parties. A viable solution to this problem is to avoid the terrestrial distribution of photons via optical fibers altogether and instead transmit them via satellite links, where the loss is dominated by diffraction instead of absorption and scattering. First dedicated s…
We determine the optimal achievable rate at which entanglement can be reliably transmitted when the memoryless channel used during transmission is unknown both to sender and receiver. To be more precise, we assume that both of them only know that the channel belongs to a given set of channels. Thus, they have to use encoding and decoding schemes that work well for the whole set.
We present a physical scheme for entanglement concentration of unknown atomic entangled states via cavity decay. In the scheme, the atomic state is used as stationary qubit and photonic state as flying qubit, and a close maximally entangled state can be obtained from pairs of partially entangled states probabilistically.
We study a device formed by a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC) coupled to the field of a cavity with a moving end-mirror and find a working point such that the mirror-light entanglement is reproduced by the BEC-light quantum correlations. This provides an experimentally viable tool for inferring mirror-light entanglement with only a limited set of assumptions. We prove the existence of tripartite entanglement in the hybrid device, persisting up to temperatures of a few milli-Kelvin, and discuss a scheme to detect it.
General relativity as a classical field theory does not predict gravitationally induced entanglement, as such, recent proposals seek an empirical demonstration of this feature which would represent a significant milestone for physics. We introduce improvements to a spin witness protocol that reduce the highly challenging experimental requirements. After rigorously assessing approximations from the original proposal [S. Bose et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 240401 (2017)], we focus on entanglement witnessing. We propose a new witness which greatly reduces the required interaction time, thereby maki…
We focus on determining the separability of an unknown bipartite quantum state $ρ$ by invoking a sufficiently large subset of all possible entanglement witnesses given the expected value of each element of a set of mutually orthogonal observables. We review the concept of an entanglement witness from the geometrical point of view and use this geometry to show that the set of separable states is not a polytope and to characterize the class of entanglement witnesses (observables) that detect entangled states on opposite sides of the set of separable states. All this serves to motivate a classica…
Entanglement witness is an effective method to detect entanglement in unknown states without doing full tomography. One of the most widespread schemes of witnessing entanglement is measuring its fidelity with respect to a pure entangled state. Recently, a large class of states whose entanglement can not be detected with the fidelity witness has been discovered in Phys.Rev.Lett \textbf{124},200502(2020). They are called unfaithful states. In this paper we propose a new way to detect entanglement by calculating the lower bound of entanglement using measurement results. Numerical simulation shows…
Experimental procedures are presented for the rapid detection of entanglement of unknown arbitrary quantum states. The methods are based on the entanglement criterion using accessible correlations and the principle of correlation complementarity. Our first scheme essentially establishes the Schmidt decomposition for pure states, with few measurements only and without the need for shared reference frames. The second scheme employs a decision tree to speed up entanglement detection. We analyze the performance of the methods using numerical simulations and verify them experimentally for various s…
We present an entanglement swapping process for unknown nonmaximally entangled photonic states, where the standard Bell-state measurement is replaced by a three-step quantum walk-like state discrimination process, i.e., the practically nontrivial coupling element of two photons is replaced by manipulating their trajectories, which will greatly enrich the dynamics of the coupling between photons in realizing quantum computation, and reduce the integration complexity of optical quantum processing. In addition, the output state can be maximally entangled, which allows for entanglement concentrati…
