Theoretically speaking, a photon can travel arbitrarily long before it enters into a detector, resulting a click. How much information can a photon carry? We study a bipartite asymmetric "two-way signaling" protocol as an extension of that proposed by Del Santo and Dakić. Suppose that Alice and Bob are distant from each other and each of them has an $n$-bit string. They are tasked to exchange the information of their local n-bit strings with each other, using only a single photon during the communication. It has been shown that the superposition of different spatial locations in a Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer enables bipartite local encodings. We show that, after the travel of a photon through a cascade of $n$-level MZ interferometers in our protocol, the one of Alice or Bob whose detector clicks can access the other's full information of $n$-bit string, while the other can gain one-bit of information. That is, the wave-particle duality makes two-way signaling possible, and a single photon can carry arbitrarily large (but finite) information.
The use of Bell's theorem in any application or experiment relies on the assumption of free choice or, more precisely, measurement independence, meaning that the measurements can be chosen freely. Here, we prove that even in the simplest Bell test - one involving 2 parties each performing 2 binary-outcome measurements - an arbitrarily small amount of measurement independence is sufficient to manifest quantum nonlocality. To this end, we introduce the notion of measurement dependent locality and show that the corresponding correlations form a convex polytope. These correlations can thus be char…
As our main result we show that, in order to achieve the randomness assisted message - and entanglement transmission capacities of a finite arbitrarily varying quantum channel it is not necessary that sender and receiver share (asymptotically perfect) common randomness. Rather, it is sufficient that they each have access to an unlimited amount of uses of one part of a correlated bipartite source. This access might be restricted to an arbitrary small (nonzero) fraction per channel use, without changing the main result. We investigate the notion of common randomness. It turns out that this is a …
States with private correlations but little or no distillable entanglement were recently reported. Here, we consider the secure distribution of such states, i.e., the situation when an adversary gives two parties such states and they have to verify privacy. We present a protocol which enables the parties to extract from such untrusted states an arbitrarily long and secure key, even though the amount of distillable entanglement of the untrusted states can be arbitrarily small.
We show that a qubit can be used to substitute for an arbitrarily large number of classical bits. We consider a physical system S interacting locally with a classical field phi(x) as it travels directly from point A to point B. The field has the property that its integrated value is an integer multiple of some constant. The problem is to determine whether the integer is odd or even. This task can be performed perfectly if S is a qubit. On the otherhand, if S is a classical system then we show that it must carry an arbitrarily large amount of classical information. We identify the physical reas…
Quantum learning (in metrology and machine learning) involves estimating unknown parameters from measurements of quantum states. The quantum Fisher information matrix can bound the average amount of information learnt about the unknown parameters per experimental trial. In several scenarios, it is advantageous to concentrate information in as few states as possible. Here, we present two "go-go" theorems proving that negativity, a narrower nonclassicality concept than noncommutation, enables unbounded and lossless distillation of Fisher information about multiple parameters in quantum learning.
Consider a source E of pure quantum states with von Neumann entropy S. By the quantum source coding theorem, arbitrarily long strings of signals may be encoded asymptotically into S qubits/signal (the Schumacher limit) in such a way that entire strings may be recovered with arbitrarily high fidelity. Suppose that classical storage is free while quantum storage is expensive and suppose that the states of E do not fall into two or more orthogonal subspaces. We show that if E can be compressed with arbitrarily high fidelity into A qubits/signal plus any amount of auxiliary classical storage then …
Systematic errors in quantum operations can be the dominating source of imperfection in achieving control over quantum systems. This problem, which has been well studied in nuclear magnetic resonance, can be addressed by replacing single operations with composite sequences of pulsed operations, which cause errors to cancel by symmetry. Remarkably, this can be achieved without knowledge of the amount of error epsilon. Independent of the initial state of the system, current techniques allow the error to be reduced to O(epsilon^3). Here, we extend the composite pulse technique to cancel errors to…
We demonstrate that amplification of arbitrarily weak randomness is possible using quantum resources. We present a randomness amplification protocol that involves Bell experiments. We find a Bell inequality which can amplify arbitrarily weak randomness and give a detailed analysis of the protocol involving it. Our analysis includes finding a sufficient violation of Bell inequality as a function of the initial quality of randomness. It has a very important property that for any quality the required violation is strictly lower than possible to obtain using quantum resources. Among other things, …
We propose a method to verify quantum steering for two qubit states with an arbitrary amount of null results when both the steering and steered parties cannot be trusted. We converted the steering inequality proposed in a recent article [Phys.~Rev.~X {\bf 2}, 031003 (2012)] to a corresponding measurement-device-independent steering criterion that depends on the heralding efficiency of the steering party, number of measurement settings, and imperfection of the state preparation. As a result, for a relative frequency of valid measurement outcomes $η_H$, the steering can be verified using a numbe…
We analyze the exchange of information in different cosmological backgrounds when sender and receiver are timelike separated and communicate through massless fields (without the exchange of light-signals). Remarkably, we show that the dominance of a cosmological constant makes the amount of recoverable information imprinted in the field by the sender extremely resilient: it does not decay in time or with the spatial separation of sender and receiver, and it actually increases with the rate of expansion of the Universe. This is in stark contrast with the information carried by conventional ligh…
In this paper, we study quantum dense coding between two arbitrarily fixed particles in a (N+2)-particle maximally-entangled states through introducing an auxiliary qubit and carrying out local measurements. It is shown that the transmitted classical information amount through such an entangled quantum channel usually is less than two classical bits. However, the information amount may reach two classical bits of information, and the classical information capacity is independent of the number of the entangled particles in the initial entangled state under certain conditions. The results offer …
When a Dirac quantum state interacts with an applied electric field the energy of the quantum state changes. It is generally assumed that there is a maximum limit on the amount of energy that can be extracted from a Dirac quantum state, due to its interaction with an electric field. In this article it is shown that this assumption is not correct and that, for a properly applied electric field, an arbitrarily large amount of energy can be extracted from the quantum state.
For entangled states of light both the amount of entanglement and the sensitivity to noise generally increase with the number of photons in the state. The entanglement-sensitivity tradeoff is investigated for a particular set of states, multi-dimensional entangled coherent states. Those states possess an arbitrarily large amount of entanglement $E$ provided the number of photons is at least of order $2^{2E}$. We calculate how fast that entanglement decays due to photon absorption losses and how much entanglement is left. We find that for very small losses the amount of entanglement lost is equ…
By carrying out appropriate continuous quantum measurements with a family of projection operators, a unitary channel can be approximated in an arbitrary precision in the trace norm sense. In particular, the quantum Zeno effect is described as an application. In the case of an infinite dimension, although the von Neumann entropy is not necessarily continuous, the difference of the entropies between the states, as mentioned above, can be arbitrarily made small under some conditions.
We initiate the study of quantifying nonlocalness of a bipartite measurement by the minimum amount of classical communication required to simulate the measurement. We derive general upper bounds, which are expressed in terms of certain tensor norms of the measurement operator. As applications, we show that (a) If the amount of communication is constant, quantum and classical communication protocols with unlimited amount of shared entanglement or shared randomness compute the same set of functions; (b) A local hidden variable model needs only a constant amount of communication to create, within…
We discuss how large amounts of steady-state quantum squeezing (beyond 3 dB) of a mechanical resonator can be obtained by driving an optomechanical cavity with two control lasers with differing amplitudes. The scheme does not rely on any explicit measurement or feedback, nor does it simply involve a modulation of an optical spring constant. Instead, it uses a dissipative mechanism with the driven cavity acting as an engineered reservoir. It can equivalently be viewed as a coherent feedback process, obtained by minimally perturbing the quantum nondemolition measurement of a single mechanical qu…
Recently there were many quantum protocols devoted to solve the millionaire problem and private comparison problem by adding a semi-honest third party. They all require complicated quantum methods, while still leak a non-trivial amount of information to at least one of the parties. But it will be shown here that once the third party is introduced, there are very simple protocols which require quantum key distribution as the only quantum resource, and the amount of information leaked can be made arbitrarily small. Furthermore, even a dishonest third party cannot spoil the protocols. Thus our so…
Cavity-QED systems have recently reached a regime where the light-matter interaction strength amounts to a non-negligible fraction of the resonance frequencies of the bare subsystems. In this regime, it is known that the usual normal-order correlation functions for the cavity-photon operators fail to describe both the rate and the statistics of emitted photons. Following Glauber's original approach, we derive a simple and general quantum theory of photodetection, valid for arbitrary light-matter interaction strengths. Our derivation uses Fermi's golden rule, together with an expansion of syste…
Photons offer the potential to carry large amounts of information in their spectral, spatial, and polarisation degrees of freedom. While state-of-the-art classical communication systems routinely aim to maximize this information-carrying capacity via wavelength and spatial-mode division multiplexing, quantum systems based on multi-mode entanglement usually suffer from low state quality, long measurement times, and limited encoding capacity. At the same time, entanglement certification methods often rely on assumptions that compromise security. Here we show the certification of photonic high-di…
A general and an arbitrarily efficient scheme for entangling the spins (or any spin-like degree of freedom) of two independent uncorrelated identical particles by a combination of two particle interferometry and which way detection is formulated. It is shown that the same setup could be used to identify the quantum statistics of the incident particles from either the sign or the magnitude of measured spin correlations. Our setup also exhibits a curious complementarity between particle distinguishability and the amount of generated entanglement.
Versatile and high-brightness sources of high-dimensional entangled photon pairs are important for emerging quantum technologies such as secure quantum communication. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a new scalable method to create photon pairs carrying orbital angular momentum that are entangled in arbitrarily high dimensions. Our method relies on indistinguishable photon pairs created coherently in different sources. We demonstrate the creation of three-dimensionally entangled states and show how to incrementally increase the dimensionality of entanglement. The generated states retain the…
The information-carrying capacity of a memory is known to be a thermodynamic resource facilitating the conversion of heat to work. Szilard's engine explicates this connection through a toy example involving an energy-degenerate two-state memory. We devise a formalism to quantify the thermodynamic value of memory in general quantum systems with nontrivial energy landscapes. Calling this the thermal information capacity, we show that it converges to the non-equilibrium Helmholtz free energy in the thermodynamic limit. We compute the capacity exactly for a general two-state (qubit) memory away fr…
Quantum backflow is the classically-forbidden effect pertaining to the fact that a particle with a positive momentum may exhibit a negative probability current at some space-time point. We investigate how this peculiar phenomenon extends to many-particle systems. We give a general formulation of quantum backflow for systems formed of $N$ free nonrelativistic structureless particles, either identical or distinguishable. Restricting our attention to bosonic systems where the $N$ identical bosons are in the same one-particle state allows us in particular to analytically show that the maximum achi…
We propose a modified Quantum Energy Teleportation (QET) scheme that uses arbitrary-dimensional qudit probes and polynomially localized Hamiltonians. We find that with an appropriate scaling of parameters, the teleported energy scales with the teleportation distance more favourably than the non-local tails of the Hamiltonians. We show that by allowing the exchange of arbitrary amounts of information between agents and in a suitable limit, an arbitrarily large amount of energy can be teleported through a massless quantum field.
This work is motivated by a quite general question: Under which circumstances are the capacities of information transmission systems continuous? The research is explicitly carried out on arbitrarily varying quantum channels (AVQCs). We give an explicit example that answers the recent question whether the transmission of messages over AVQCs can benefit from distribution of randomness between the legitimate sender and receiver in the affirmative. The specific class of channels introduced in that example is then extended to show that the deterministic capacity does have discontinuity points, whil…
