Quantum information theory is a multidisciplinary field whose objective is to understand what happens when information is stored in the state of a quantum system. Quantum mechanics provides us with a new resource, called quantum entanglement, which can be exploited to achieve novel tasks such as teleportation and superdense coding. Current technologies allow the transmission of entangled photon pairs across distances up to roughly 100 kilometers. For longer distances, noise arising from various sources degrade the transmission of entanglement to the point that it becomes impossible to use the entanglement as a resource for future tasks. A strategy for dealing with this difficulty is to employ quantum repeaters, stations intermediate between the sender and receiver which participate in the process of entanglement distillation, thereby improving on what the sender and receiver could do on their own. In this work, we study entanglement distillation between two recipients sharing a mixed state and with the help of repeater stations. We extend the notion of entanglement of assistance to arbitrary states and give a protocol for extracting pure entanglement. We also study quantum communication protocols in a more general context. We give a new protocol for the task of multiparty state merging. The previous multiparty state merging protocol required the use of time-sharing. Our protocol does not require time-sharing for distributed compression of two senders. In the one-shot regime, we achieve multiparty state merging with entanglement costs not restricted to corner points of the entanglement cost region. Our analysis of the entanglement cost is performed using (smooth) min- and max-entropies. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by looking at different examples.
We describe various results related to the random distillation of multiparty entangled states - that is, conversion of such states into entangled states shared between fewer parties, where those parties are not predetermined. In previous work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 260501 (2007)] we showed that certain output states (namely Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs) could be reliably acquired from a prescribed initial multipartite state (namely the W state) via random distillation that could not be reliably created between predetermined parties. Here we provide a more rigorous definition of what cons…
We provide a generalization for the polygamy constraint of multiparty entanglement in arbitrary dimensional quantum systems. By using the $β$th-power of entanglement of assistance for $0\leq β\leq1$ and the Hamming weight of the binary vector related with the distribution of subsystems, we establish a class of weighted polygamy inequalities of multiparty entanglement in arbitrary dimensional quantum systems. We further show that our class of weighted polygamy inequalities can even be improved to be tighter inequalities with some conditions on the assisted entanglement of bipartite subsystems.
We investigate asymptotic distillation of entanglement in the presence of an unlimited amount of bound entanglement for bi-partite systems. We show that the distillability is still bounded by the relative entropy of entanglement. This offers a strong support to the fact that bound entanglement does not improve distillation of entanglement.
We characterize the operational task of environment-assisted distillation of quantum coherence under different sets of free operations when only a finite supply of copies of a given state is available. We first evaluate the one-shot assisted distillable coherence exactly, and introduce a semidefinite programming bound on it in terms of a smooth entropic quantity. We prove the bound to be tight for all systems in dimensions 2 and 3, which allows us to obtain computable expressions for the one-shot rate of distillation, establish an analytical expression for the best achievable fidelity of assis…
We investigate the issue of assisted coherence distillation in the asymptotic limit (considering infinite copies of the resource states), by coordinately performing the identical local operations on the auxiliary systems of each copy. When we further restrict the coordinate operations to projective measurements, the distillation process is branched into many sub-processes. Finally, a simple formula is given that the assisted distillable coherence should be the maximal average coherence of the residual states. The formula makes the experimental research of assisted coherence distillation possib…
Nonlocality without entanglement and its subsequent generalizations offer deep information-theoretic insights and subsequently find several useful applications. Concept of genuinely nonlocal set of product states emerges as a natural multipartite generalization of this phenomenon. Existence of such sets eventually motivates the problem concerning their entanglement-assisted discrimination. Here, we construct examples of genuinely nonlocal product states for arbitrary number of parties. Strength of genuine nonlocality of these sets can be considered minimal as their perfect discrimination is po…
In the task of assisted coherence distillation via the set of operations X, where X is either local incoherent operations and classical communication (LICC), local quantum-incoherent operations and classical communication (LQICC), separable incoherent operations (SI), or separable quantum incoherent operations (SQI), two parties, namely Alice and Bob, share many copies of a bipartite joint state. The aim of the process is to generate the maximal possible coherence on the subsystem of Bob. In this paper, we investigate the assisted coherence distillation of some special mixed states, the states…
The remarkable phenomenon of catalyst tells us that adding a catalyst could help state transformation. In this paper, we consider the problem of catalyst-assisted probabilistic coherence distillation for mixed states under strictly incoherent operations. To this end, we first present the necessary and sufficient conditions for distilling a target pure coherent state from an initial mixed state via stochastic strictly incoherent operations and the maximal probability of obtaining the target pure state from the initial state. With the help of these results, we present the necessary and sufficien…
Logic-qubit entanglement has attracted much attention in both quantum communication and quantum computation. Here, we present an efficient protocol to distill the logic-qubit entanglement with the help of cross-Kerr nonlinearity. This protocol not only can purify the logic bit-flip error and logic phase-flip error, but also can correct the physical bit-flip error completely. We use cross-Kerr nonlinearity to construct quantum nondemolition detectors. Our distillation protocol for logic-qubit entanglement may be useful for the practical applications in quantum information, especially in long-di…
We construct new entanglement distillation protocols by interpolating between the recurrence and hashing protocols. This leads to asymptotic two-way distillation protocols, resulting in an improvement of the distillation rate for all mixed Bell diagonal entangled states, even for the ones with very high fidelity. We also present a method how entanglement-assisted distillation protocols can be converted into non-entanglement-assisted protocols with the same yield.
We evaluate the one-shot entanglement of assistance for an arbitrary bipartite state. This yields another interesting result, namely a characterization of the one-shot distillable entanglement of a bipartite pure state. This result is shown to be stronger than that obtained by specializing the one-shot hashing bound to pure states. Finally, we show how the one-shot result yields the operational interpretation of the asymptotic entanglement of assistance proved in [Smolin et al., Phys. Rev. A 72, 052317 (2005)].
We present a protocol for performing state merging when multiple parties share a single copy of a mixed state, and analyze the entanglement cost in terms of min- and max-entropies. Our protocol allows for interpolation between corner points of the rate region without the need for time-sharing, a primitive which is not available in the one-shot setting. We also compare our protocol to the more naive strategy of repeatedly applying a single-party merging protocol one party at a time, by performing a detailed analysis of the rates required to merge variants of the embezzling states. Finally, we a…
We find a regularized formula for the entanglement-assisted (EA) capacity region for quantum multiple access channels (QMAC). We illustrate the capacity region calculation with the example of the collective phase-flip channel which admits a single-letter characterization. On the way, we provide a first-principles proof of the EA coding theorem based on a packing argument. We observe that the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland theorem may be obtained from a modification of our EA protocol. We remark on the existence of a family hierarchy of protocols for multiparty scenarios with a single receiver,…
Quantum coherence, which quantifies the superposition properties of a quantum state, plays an indispensable role in quantum resource theory. A recent theoretical work [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{116}, 070402 (2016)] studied the manipulation of quantum coherence in bipartite or multipartite systems under the protocol Local Incoherent Operation and Classical Communication (LQICC). Here we present the first experimental realization of obtaining maximal coherence in assisted distillation protocol based on linear optical system. The results of our work show that the optimal distillable coherence rate…
We analyse the quantum mechanical limits to the plasmon-assisted entanglement transfer observed by E. Altewischer, M.P. van Exter, and J.P. Woerdman [Nature, 418, 304 (2002)]. The maximal violation S of Bell's inequality at the photodetectors behind two linear media (such as the perforated metal films in the experiment) can be described by two ratio's tau_1, tau_2 of polarization-dependent transmission probabilities. A fully entangled incident state is transferred without degradation for tau_1=tau_2, but a relatively large mismatch of tau_1 and tau_2 can be tolerated with a small reduction of …
Motivated by the problem of designing quantum repeaters, we study entanglement distillation between two parties, Alice and Bob, starting from a mixed state and with the help of "repeater" stations. To treat the case of a single repeater, we extend the notion of entanglement of assistance to arbitrary mixed tripartite states and exhibit a protocol, based on a random coding strategy, for extracting pure entanglement. The rates achievable by this protocol formally resemble those achievable if the repeater station could merge its state to one of Alice and Bob even when such merging is impossible. …
We study the process of assisted work distillation. This scenario arises when two parties share a bipartite quantum state $ρ_{AB}$ and their task is to locally distil the optimal amount of work when one party is restricted to thermal operations whereas the other can perform general quantum operations and they are allowed to communicate classically. We demonstrate that this question is intimately related to the distillation of classical/quantum correlations. In particular, we show that the advantage of one party performing global measurements over many copies of $ρ_{AB}$ is related to the non-a…
Generalizing a boolean function from Cleve and Buhrman \cite{cb:sqec}, we consider the class of {\it accumulative boolean functions} of the form $f_B(X_1,X_2,..., X_m)=\bigoplus_{i=1}^n t_B(x_i^1x_i^2... x_i^m)$, where $X_j=(x^j_1,x^j_2,..., x^j_n), 1\leq j\leq m$ and $t_B(x_i^1x_i^2... x_i^m)=1$ for input $m$-tuples $x_i^1x_i^2...x_i^m\in B\subseteq A\subseteq \{0,1\}^n$, and 0, if $x_i^1x_i^2...x_i^m\in A\setminus B$. Here the set $A$ is the input {\it promise} set for function $f_B$. The input vectors $X_j, 1\leq j\leq m$ are given to the $m\geq 3$ parties respectively, who communicate cbit…
We introduce and study the task of assisted coherence distillation. This task arises naturally in bipartite systems where both parties work together to generate the maximal possible coherence on one of the subsystems. Only incoherent operations are allowed on the target system while general local quantum operations are permitted on the other, an operational paradigm that we call local quantum-incoherent operations and classical communication (LQICC). We show that the asymptotic rate of assisted coherence distillation for pure states is equal to the coherence of assistance, an analog of the ent…
Complete security proofs for quantum communication protocols can be notoriously involved, which convolutes their verification, and obfuscates the key physical insights the security finally relies on. In such cases, for the majority of the community, the utility of such proofs may be restricted. Here we provide a simple proof of confidentiality for parallel quantum channels established via entanglement distillation based on hashing, in the presence of noise, and a malicious eavesdropper who is restricted only by the laws of quantum mechanics. The direct contribution lies in improving the linear…
Encoding and decoding quantum information in a multipartite quantum system are indispensable for quantum error correction and also play crucial roles in multiparty tasks in distributed quantum information processing such as quantum secret sharing. To quantitatively characterize nonlocal properties of multipartite quantum transformations for encoding and decoding, we analyze entanglement costs of encoding and decoding quantum information in a multipartite quantum system distributed among spatially separated parties connected by a network. This analysis generalizes previous studies of entangleme…
Recently Horodecki et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100402 (2003)] introduced an important quantum information processing paradigm, in which two parties sharing many copies of the same bipartite quantum state distill local pure states, by means of local unitary operations assisted by a one-way (two-way) completely dephasing channel. Local pure states are a valuable resource from a thermodynamical point of view, since they allow thermal energy to be converted into work by local quantum heat engines. We give a simple information-theoretical characterization of the one-way distillable local purity, w…
We investigate the irreversibility of entanglement distillation for a symmetric d-1 parameter family of mixed bipartite quantum states acting on Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension d x d. We prove that in this family the entanglement cost is generically strictly larger than the distillable entanglement, such that the set of states for which the distillation process is asymptotically reversible is of measure zero. This remains true even if the distillation process is catalytically assisted by pure state entanglement and every operation is allowed, which preserves the positivity of the partial…
In this paper, we consider a quantum key distribution protocol (QKD) with two-way classical communication that is assisted by one-time pad encryption. We propose a two-way preprocessing that uses one-time pad encryption by previously shared secret key, and the net key rate of the QKD with proposed preprocessing exceeds the key rate of the QKD without it. The preprocessing is reduced to the entanglement distillation protocol with two-way classical communication and previously shared EPR pairs (two-way breeding protocol), and the security of QKD with the preprocessing is guaranteed in the same w…
The ability to distill quantum coherence is pivotal for optimizing the performance of quantum technologies; however, such a task cannot always be accomplished with certainty. Here we develop a general framework of probabilistic distillation of quantum coherence in a one-shot setting, establishing fundamental limitations for different classes of free operations. We first provide a geometric interpretation for the maximal success probability, showing that under maximally incoherent operations (MIO) and dephasing-covariant incoherent operations (DIO) the problem can be simplified into efficiently…
It is shown that by means of local interactions between a quantized relativistic field and a pair of non-entangled atoms, entanglement can be extracted from the vacuum and delivered to the atoms. The resulting mixed state of the atoms can be further distilled to EPR pairs. Therefore, in principle, teleportation and other entanglement assisted quantum communication tasks can rely on the vacuum alone as a resource for entanglement.
Coherence and entanglement are fundamental concepts in resource theory. The coherence (entanglement) of assistance is the coherence (entanglement) that can be extracted assisted by another party with local measurement and classical communication. We introduce and study the general coherence of assistance. First, in terms of real symmetric concave functions on the probability simplex, the coherence of assistance and the entanglement of assistance are shown to be in one-to-one correspondence. We then introduce two classes of quantum states: the assisted maximally coherent states and the assisted…
We give the first systematic study on the second order asymptotics of the operational task of coherence distillation with and without assistance. In the unassisted setting, we introduce a variant of randomness extraction framework where free incoherent operations are allowed before the incoherent measurement and the randomness extractors. We then show that the maximum number of random bits extractable from a given quantum state is precisely equal to the maximum number of coherent bits that can be distilled from the same state. This relation enables us to derive tight second order expansions of…
Nonlocal advantage of quantum imaginarity in Schwarzchild spacetime
School of Mathematics and Systems Science, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University（广东技术师范大学数学与系统科学学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Central China Normal University（华中师范大学数学与统计学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Jianghan University（江汉大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Dongguan University of Technology（东莞理工学院计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Hainan Normal University（海南师范大学数学与统计学院）
We introduce two dual, purely quantum protocols: for entanglement distillation assisted by quantum communication (``mother'' protocol) and for entanglement assisted quantum communication (``father'' protocol). We show how a large class of ``children'' protocols (including many previously known ones) can be derived from the two by direct application of teleportation or super-dense coding. Furthermore, the parent may be recovered from most of the children protocols by making them ``coherent''. We also summarize the various resource trade-offs these protocols give rise to.
Quantum error correction and fault-tolerance have provided the possibility for large scale quantum computations without a detrimental loss of quantum information. A very natural class of gates for fault-tolerant quantum computation is the Clifford gate set and as such their usefulness for universal quantum computation is of great interest. Clifford group gates augmented by magic state preparation give the possibility of simulating universal quantum computation. However, experimentally one cannot expect to perfectly prepare magic states. Nonetheless, it has been shown that by repeatedly applyin…
The scheme of entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting (EAQEC) codes assumes that the ebits of the receiver are error-free. In practical situations, errors on these ebits are unavoidable, which diminishes the error-correcting ability of these codes. We consider two different versions of this problem. We first show that any (nondegenerate) standard stabilizer code can be transformed into an EAQEC code that can correct errors on the qubits of both sender and receiver. These EAQEC codes are equivalent to standard stabilizer codes, and hence the decoding techniques of standard stabilizer cod…
We consider the distribution of high-dimensional entangled states to multiple parties via noisy channels and the subsequent probabilistic conversion of these states to desired target states using stochastic local operations and classical communication. We show that such state-conversion protocols can be enhanced by embedded channel-estimation routines at no additional cost in terms of the number of copies of the distributed states. The defining characteristic of our strategy is the use of those copies for which the conversion was unsuccessful for the estimation of the noise, thus allowing one …
We study the task of entanglement distillation in the one-shot setting under different classes of quantum operations which extend the set of local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Establishing a general formalism which allows for a straightforward comparison of their exact achievable performance, we relate the fidelity of distillation under these classes of operations with a family of entanglement monotones and the rates of distillation with a class of smoothed entropic quantities based on the hypothesis testing relative entropy. We then characterise exactly the one-shot distilla…
We give a simple, direct proof of the "mother" protocol of quantum information theory. In this new formulation, it is easy to see that the mother, or rather her generalization to the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol, simultaneously accomplishes two goals: quantum communication-assisted entanglement distillation, and state transfer from the sender to the receiver. As a result, in addition to her other "children," the mother protocol generates the state merging primitive of Horodecki, Oppenheim and Winter, a fully quantum reverse Shannon theorem, and a new class of distributed compression pro…
Braiding of anyons such as Majoranas or parafermions provides only Clifford gates which do not form a universal set of quantum gates. We propose a robust and resource-efficient scheme to perform a non-Clifford gate on a logical qudit encoded in parafermionic zero modes via the Aharonov-Casher effect. This gate can be implemented by moving a half flux quantum around the pair of parafermionic zero modes. The parafermion modes can be realized in a two-dimensional set-up using existing proposals and a half fluxon carrying half flux quantum can be created as a part of a half fluxon/anti-half fluxon…
We consider a quantum relay which is used by two parties to perform several continuous-variable protocols of quantum communication, from entanglement distribution (swapping and distillation), to quantum teleportation, and quantum key distribution. The theory of these protocols is suitably extended to a non-Markovian model of decoherence characterized by correlated Gaussian noise in the bosonic environment. In the worst case scenario where bipartite entanglement is completely lost at the relay, we show that the various protocols can be reactivated by the assistance of classical (separable) corr…
Symmetry and AI-assisted discovery of magic-state factories
Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science（量子信息与计算机科学联合中心）；NIST（美国国家标准与技术研究院）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；IBM Quantum（IBM量子）；IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；Center for Theoretical Physics（理论物理中心）；Leinweber Institute（莱因韦伯研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
