Time-frequency (TF) filtering of analog signals has played a crucial role in the development of radio-frequency communications, and is currently being recognized as an essential capability for communications, both classical and quantum, in the optical frequency domain. How best to design optical time-frequency (TF) filters to pass a targeted temporal mode (TM), and to reject background (noise) photons in the TF detection window? The solution for coherent TF filtering is known, the quantum pulse gate, whereas the conventional, more common method is implemented by a sequence of incoherent spectral filtering and temporal gating operations. To compare these two methods, we derive a general formalism for two-stage incoherent time frequency filtering, finding expressions for signal pulse transmission efficiency, and for the ability to discriminate TMs, which allows the blocking of unwanted background light. We derive the tradeoff between efficiency and TM discrimination ability, and find a remarkably concise relation between these two quantities and the time-bandwidth product of the combined filters. We apply the formalism to two examples, rectangular filters or Gaussian filters, both of which have known orthogonal-function decompositions. The formalism can be applied to any state of light occupying the input temporal mode, e.g., classical coherent-state signals or pulsed single photon states of light. We point out implications in classical and quantum optical communications. As an example, we study quantum key distribution, wherein strong rejection of background noise is necessary to maintain a high quality of entanglement, while high signal transmission is needed to ensure a useful key generation rate.
Spatially resolving two incoherent point sources whose separation is well below the diffraction limit dictated by classical optics has recently been shown possible using techniques that decompose the incoming radiation into orthogonal transverse modes. Such a demultiplexing procedure, however, must be perfectly calibrated to the transverse profile of the incoming light as any misalignment of the modes effectively restores the diffraction limit for small source separations. We study by how much can one mitigate such an effect at the level of measurement which, after being imperfectly demultiple…
Noise-robust discrimination of incoherent point sources with spatial-mode demultiplexing
School of Sciences and Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Quantum State Control and Optical Field Manipulation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学理学院与浙江省量子态调控与光场操纵重点实验室）
Many quantum mechanical experiments can be viewed as multi-round interactive protocols between known quantum circuits and an unknown quantum process. Fully quantum "coherent" access to the unknown process is known to provide an advantage in many discrimination tasks compared to when only incoherent access is permitted, but it is unclear if this advantage persists when the process is noisy. Here, we show that a quantum advantage can be maintained when distinguishing between two noisy single qubit rotation channels. Numerical and analytical calculations reveal a distinct transition between optim…
The problem of quantum state filtering consists of determining whether an unknown quantum state, which is chosen from a known set of states, is either a particular, specified state, or not. We consider this problem for the case that the filtering procedure is required to be unambiguous, which necessitates admitting inconclusive answers when the given states are not orthogonal. As an application, we propose an efficient, probabilistic procedure for distinguishing between sets of Boolean functions, which is an extension of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm.
We present a method to separate coherent and incoherent contributions of cathodoluminescence (CL) by using a time-resolved coincidence detection scheme. For a proof-of-concept experiment, we generate CL by irradiating an optical multimode fiber with relativistic electrons in a transmission electron microscope. A temporal analysis of the CL reveals a large peak in coincidence counts for small time delays, also known as photon bunching. Additional measurements allow us to attribute the bunching peak to the temporal correlations of coherent CL (Cherenkov radiation) created by individual electrons…
Deterministic discrimination of nonorthogonal states is forbidden by quantum measurement theory. However, if we do not want to succeed all the time, i.e. allow for inconclusive outcomes to occur, then unambiguous discrimination becomes possible with a certain probability of success. A variant of the problem is set discrimination: the states are grouped in sets and we want to determine to which particular set a given pure input state belongs. We consider here the simplest case, termed quantum state filtering, when the $N$ given non-orthogonal states, $\{|ψ_{1} >,..., |ψ_{N} > \}$, are divided i…
Quantum state filtering is a variant of the unambiguous state discrimination problem: the states are grouped in sets and we want to determine to which particular set a given input state belongs.The simplest case, when the N given states are divided into two subsets and the first set consists of one state only while the second consists of all of the remaining states, is termed quantum state filtering. We derived previously the optimal strategy for the case of N non-orthogonal states, {|ψ_{1} >, ..., |ψ_{N} >}, for distinguishing |ψ_1 > from the set {|ψ_2 >, ..., |ψ_N >} and the corresponding op…
We investigate the discrimination of pure-mixed (quantum filtering) and mixed-mixed states and compare their optimal success probability with the one for discriminating other pairs of pure states superposed by the vectors included in the mixed states. We prove that under the equal-fidelity condition, the pure-pure state discrimination scheme is superior to the pure-mixed (mixed-mixed) one. With respect to quantum filtering, the coherence exists only in one pure state and is detrimental to the state discrimination for lower dimensional systems; while it is the opposite for the mixed-mixed case …
We introduce a filter using a noise-free quantum buffer with large optical bandwidth that can both filter temporal-spectral modes, as well as inter-convert them and change their frequency. We show that such quantum buffers optimally filter out temporal-spectral noise; producing identical single-photons from many distinguishable noisy single-photon sources with the minimum required reduction in brightness. We then experimentally demonstrate a noise-free quantum buffer in a warm atomic system that is well matched to quantum dots and can outperform all intensity (incoherent) filtering schemes for…
We investigate statistics of the photon (phonon) field undergoing linear and nonlinear damping processes. An effective two-photon (phonon) nonlinear "cooling by heating" process is realized from linear damping by spectral filtering of the heat baths present in the system. This cooling process driven by incoherent quantum thermal noise can create quantum states of the photon field. In fact, for high temperatures of the spectrally filtered heat baths, sub-Poissonian statistics with strong antibunching in the photon (phonon) field are reported. This notion of the emergence and control of quantumn…
In this work we investigate the quantum information theoretical limits to several tasks related to lifetime estimation and discrimination of a two-level spontaneous optical emitter. We focus in particular on the model problem of resolving two mutually incoherent exponential decays with highly overlapping temporal probability profiles. Mirroring recent work on quantum-inspired super-resolution of point emitters, we find that direct lifetime measurement suffers from an analogue of "Rayleigh's Curse" when the time constants of the two decay channels approach one another. We propose alternative me…
We investigate the unambiguous comparison of quantum states in a scenario that is more general than the one that was originally suggested by Barnett et al. First, we find the optimal solution for the comparison of two states taken from a set of two pure states with arbitrary a priori probabilities. We show that the optimal coherent measurement is always superior to the optimal incoherent measurement. Second, we develop a strategy for the comparison of two states from a set of N pure states, and find an optimal solution for some parameter range when N=3. In both cases we use the reduction metho…
A precise security analysis of practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems is an important step for improving their performance. Here we consider a class of quantum soft filtering operations, which generalizes the unambiguous state discrimination (USD) technique. These operations can be applied as a basis for a security analysis of the original coherent one-way (COW) QKD protocol since their application interpolates between beam-splitting (BS) and USD attacks. We demonstrate that a zero-error attack based on quantum soft filtering operations gives a larger amount of the information for Ev…
We theoretically and experimentally investigate conditional enhancement of overall coherence of quantum states by probabilistic quantum operations that apply to the input state a quantum filter diagonal in the basis of incoherent states. We identify the optimal filters that for a given probability of successful filtering maximize the output coherence. We verify the performance of the studied quantum filters in a proof-of-principle experiment with linear optics, where a pair of two-level quantum systems is represented by polarization states of two photons. We comprehensively characterize the im…
Quantum random number generators (QRNGs) harness the intrinsic randomness in measurement processes: the measurement outputs are truly random given the input state is a superposition of the eigenstates of the measurement operators. In the case of \emph{trusted} devices, true randomness could be generated from a mixed state $ρ$ so long as the system entangled with $ρ$ is well protected. We propose a random number generation scheme based on measuring the quadrature fluctuations of a single mode thermal state using an optical homodyne detector. By mixing the output of a broadband amplified spontan…
We consider passive imaging tasks involving discrimination between known candidate objects and investigate the best possible accuracy with which the correct object can be identified. We analytically compute quantum-limited error bounds for hypothesis tests on any database of incoherent, quasi-monochromatic objects when the imaging system is dominated by optical diffraction. We further show that object-independent linear-optical spatial processing of the collected light exactly achieves these ultimate error rates, exhibiting superior scaling than spatially-resolved direct imaging as the scene b…
The distribution of coherence in multipartite systems is one of the fundamental problems in the resource theory of coherence. To quantify the coherence in multipartite systems more precisely, we introduce new coherence measures, incoherent-quantum (IQ) coherence measures, on bipartite systems by the max- and min- relative entropies and provide the operational interpretation in certain subchannel discrimination problem. By introducing the smooth max- and min- relative entropies of incoherent-quantum (IQ) coherence on bipartite systems, we exhibit the distribution of coherence in multipartite sy…
We describe some of the main external mechanisms that lead to a loss of antibunching, i.e., that spoil the character of a given quantum light to deliver its photons separated the ones from the others. Namely, we consider contamination by noise, a time jitter in the photon detection and the effect of frequency filtering (or detection with finite bandwidth). The emission from a two-level system under both incoherent and coherent driving is taken as a particular case of special interest. The coherent case is further separated into its vanishing (Heitler) and high (Mollow) driving regimes. We prov…
For any resource theory it is essential to identify tasks for which resource objects offer advantage over free objects. We show that this identification can always be accomplished for resource theories of quantum measurements in which free objects form a convex subset of measurements on a given Hilbert space. To this aim we prove that every resource measurement offers advantage for some quantum state discrimination task. Moreover, we give an operational interpretation of robustness, which quantifies the minimal amount of noise that must be added to a measurement to make it free. Specifically, …
We have designed and implemented a photon-pair source, based on the spontaneous four wave mixing (SFWM) process in a few-mode fiber, in a geometry which permits multiple, simultaneous SFWM processes, each associated with a distinct combination of transverse modes for the four participating waves. In our source: i) each process is group-velocity-matched so that it is, by design, nearly-factorable, and ii) the spectral separation between neighboring processes is greater than the marginal spectral width of each process. Consequently, there is a direct correspondence between the joint amplitude of…
A simple calculation method for photon statistics of frequency-filtered fields is proposed. This method, based on eigenvalue decompositions of superoperators, allows us to study effects on the photon statistics of spectral filtering by various types of filters, such as Gaussian and rectangular filters as well as Lorentzian filters, which is not possible by conventional approaches. As an example, this method is applied to a simulation of quantum dot single-photon emitters, where we found the efficient choice of the filter types to have pure single photons depends on the excitation conditions i.…
We show how "single" quantum dots, each hosting a singlet-triplet qubit, can be placed in arrays to build a spin quantum cellular automaton. A fast ($\sim 10$ ns) deterministic coherent singlet-triplet filtering, as opposed to current incoherent tunneling/slow-adiabatic based quantum gates (operation time $\sim 300$ ns), can be employed to produce a two-qubit gate through capacitive (electrostatic) coupling that can operate over significant distances. This is the coherent version of the widely discussed charge and nano-magnet cellular automata and would offer speed, reduce dissipation, perform…
We apply our recently developed theory of frequency-filtered and time-resolved N-photon correlations to study the two-photon spectra of a variety of systems of increasing complexity: single mode emitters with two limiting statistics (one harmonic oscillator or a two-level system) and the various combinations that arise from their coupling. We consider both the linear and nonlinear regimes under incoherent excitation. We find that even the simplest systems display a rich dynamics of emission, not accessible by simple single photon spectroscopy. In the strong coupling regime, novel two-photon em…
Passive optical superresolution at the quantum limit
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；RTX BBN Technologies（RTX BBN技术公司）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）
Effective Sub-Quantum Readout for Non-Monochromatic Axion Signals in High-$Q$ Haloscopes
The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Physics, Stockholm University（斯德哥尔摩大学）；Department of Physics, Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Wright Laboratory, Yale University（耶鲁大学赖特实验室）
