This paper presents properties of the so-called quasi-Bell states: entangled states written as superpositions of nonorthogonal states. It is shown that a special class of those states, namely entangled coherent states, are more robust against decoherence due to photon absorption than the standard bi-photon Bell states.
Properties of entangled states based on nonorthogonal states are clarified. Especially, it is shown that they can have complete degree of entanglement.
A necessary and sufficient condition for the maximal entanglement of bipartite nonorthogonal pure states is found. The condition is applied to the maximal entanglement of coherent states. Some new classes of maximally entangled coherent states are explicited constructed; their limits give rise to maximally entangled Bell-like states.
We give conditions under which general bipartite entangled nonorthogonal states become maximally entangled states. By the conditions we construct a large class of entangled nonorthogonal states with exact one ebit of entanglement in both bipartite and multipartite systems. One remarkable property is that the amount of entanglement in this class of states is independent on the parameters involved in the states. Finally we discuss how to generate the bipartite maximally entangled nonorthogonal states.
We show that bipartite entanglements involving non-orthogonal states are {\it necessarily nonmaximally} entangled, however {\it small} the non-orthogonality may be. How the deviation from maximal entanglement is related to nonorthogonality is quantified by using two independent measures of entanglement corresponding to the violation of Bell's inequality and the entropy measure respectively. This result is true even if one of the subsystems has orthogonal states. An application of this is that a maximal violation of Bell's inequality in entangled neutral kaons is not possible in the presence of…
In this work we propose a probabilistic method which allows an unambiguous modification of two non-orthogonal quantum states. We experimentally implement this protocol by using two-photon polarization states generated in the process of spontaneous parametric down conversion. In the experiment, for codifying initial quantum states, we consider single photon states and heralded detection. We show that the application of this protocol to entangled states, it allows a fine control of the amount of entanglement of the initial state.
Self-interactions and interaction with the environment tend to push quantum systems toward states of maximal entanglement. This is a definition of decoherence. We argue that these maximally entangled states fall into the well-defined classes that can be uniquely described by the values of certain entanglement invariants. After discussing these ideas we present examples of maximally entangled states for a number of generic systems, construct compact states in the most entangled classes for tripartite systems, and suggest how they may be constructed for other $n$-partite systems. We study random…
We investigate the decay of entanglement, due to decoherence, of multi-qubit systems that are initially prepared in highly (in some cases maximally) entangled states. We assume that during the decoherence processes each qubit of the system interacts with its own, independent environment. We determine, for systems with a small number of qubits and for various decoherence channels, the initial states exhibiting the most robust entanglement. We also consider a restricted version of this robustness optimization problem, only involving states equivalent under local unitary transformations to the |G…
When a superposition $(|α>-|-α>)$ of two coherent states with opposite phase falls upon a 50-50 beamsplitter, the resulting state is entangled. Remarkably, the amount of entanglement is exactly 1 ebit, irrespective of $α$, as was recently discovered by O. Hirota and M. Sasaki. Here we discuss decoherence properties of such states and give a simple protocol that teleports one qubit encoded in Schrödinger cat states
We propose the generation of entangled states with trapped calcium ions using a combination of an rf dressed state and a spin dependent force. Using this method, a decoherence-free entangled state of rf qubits can be directly generated and ideally its fidelity is close to unity. We demonstrate an rf entangled state with a fidelity of 0.68, which has a coherence time of more than 200 ms by virtue of the fact that it is an eigenstate with energy gaps between adjacent levels.Using the same technique, we also produce a qutrit-qutrit entangled state with a fidelity of 0.77, which exceeds the thresh…
By choosing H nucleus in Carbon-13 labelled trichloroethylene as one qubit environment, and two C nuclei as a two-qubit system, we have simulated quantum decoherence when the system lies in an entangled state using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Decoupling technique is used to trace over the environment degrees of freedom. Experimental results show agreements with the theoretical predictions. Our experiment scheme can be generalized to the case that environment is composed of multiple qubits.
We study two different decoherence modes for entangled qubits by considering a Liouville - von Neumann master equation. Mode A is determined by projection operators onto the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and mode B by projectors onto rotated states. We present solutions for general and for Bell diagonal states and calculate for the later the mixedness and the amount of entanglement given by the concurrence. We propose a realization of the decoherence modes within neutron interferometry by applying fluctuating magnetic fields. An experimental test of the Kraus operator decomposition describing…
Decoherence-free states protect quantum information from collective noise, the predominant cause of decoherence in current implementations of quantum communication and computation. Here we demonstrate that spontaneous parametric down-conversion can be used to generate four-photon states which enable the encoding of one qubit in a decoherence-free subspace. The immunity against noise is verified by quantum state tomography of the encoded qubit. We show that particular states of the encoded qubit can be distinguished by local measurements on the four photons only.
Distillability sudden death and sudden birth in a two-qutrit system under decoherence of finite temperature is studied in detail. By using of the negativity and realignment criterion, it is shown that certain initial prepared free entangled states may become bound entangled or separable states in a finite time. Moreover, initial prepared bound entangled or separable states also may become distillabile entangled states in a finite time.
We microscopically model the decoherence dynamics of entangled coherent states under the influence of vacuum fluctuation. We derive an exact master equation with time-dependent coefficients reflecting the memory effect of the environment, by using the Feynman-Vernon influence functional theory in the coherent-state representation. Under the Markovian approximation, our master equation recovers the widely used Lindblad equation in quantum optics. We then investigate the non-Markovian entanglement dynamics of the quantum channel in terms of the entangled coherent states under noise. Compared wit…
We study the exact decoherence dynamics of the entangled squeezed state of two single-mode optical fields interacting with two independent and uncorrelated environments. We analyze in detail the non-Markovian effects on the entanglement evolution of the initially entangled squeezed state for different environmental correlation time scales. We find that the environments have dual actions on the system: backaction and dissipation. In mparticular, when the environmental correlation time scale is comparable to the time scale for significant change in the system, the backaction would counteract the…
The Lindblad generators of the master equation define which kind of decoherence happens in an open quantum system. We are working with a two qubit system and choose the generators to be projection operators on the eigenstates of the system and unitary bilocal rotations of them. The resulting decoherence modes are studied in detail. Besides the general solutions we investigate the special case of maximally entangled states - the Bell singlet states. The results are depicted in the so-called spin geometry picture which allows to illustrate the evolution of the (nonlocal) correlations stored in a…
Every entangled state can be perturbed, for instance by decoherence, and stay entangled. For a large class of pure entangled states, we show how large the perturbation can be. Our class includes all pure bipartite and all maximally entangled states. For an entangled state, E, the constucted neighborhood of entangled states is the region outside two parallel hyperplanes, which sandwich the set of all separable states. The states for which these neighborhoods are largest are the maximally entangled ones. As the number of particles, or the dimensions of the Hilbert spaces for two of the particles…
We analyse decoherence properties of entangled coherent states (ECSs) due to channel losses, and compare to the performance of bi-photon Bell states. By employing the concept of "entanglement of formation" (EOF), the degradation of fidelity and degree of entanglement are calculated. Two situations are considered: (1) asymmetric and (2) symmetric noise channel. In the first case, only the lower bound of EOF is given. However, in the latter case, we have obtained an explicit expression of concurrence (and then EOF) and found surprisingly our result is just incompatible with that of [Phys. Rev. A…
In a recent work (Borras et al., Phys. Rev. A {\bf 79}, 022108 (2009)), we have determined, for various decoherence channels, four-qubit initial states exhibiting the most robust possible entanglement. Here we explore some geometrical features of the trajectories in state space generated by the decoherence process, connecting the initially robust pure state with the completely decohered mixed state obtained at the end of the evolution. We characterize these trajectories by recourse to the distance between the concomitant time dependent mixed state and different reference states.
We present a scheme for multiparty quantum secret sharing of a private key with pure entangled states and decoy photons. The boss, say Alice uses the decoy photons, which are randomly in one of the four nonorthogonal single-photon states, to prevent a potentially dishonest agent from eavesdropping freely. This scheme requires the parties of communication to have neither an ideal single-photon quantum source nor a maximally entangled one, which makes this scheme more convenient than others in a practical application. Moreover, it has the advantage of having high intrinsic efficiency for qubits …
Quantum properties are soon subject to decoherence once the quantum system interacts with the classical environment. In this paper we experimentally test how propagation losses, in a Gaussian channel, affect the bi-partite Gaussian entangled state generated by a sub-threshold type-II optical parametric oscillator (OPO). Experimental results are discussed in terms of different quantum markers, as teleportation fidelity, quantum discord and mutual information, and continuous variables (CV) entanglement criteria. To analyse state properties we have retrieved the composite system covariance matrix…
We investigate the influence of environmental noise on polarization entangled light generated by parametric emission in a cavity. By adopting a recently developed separability criterion, we show that: i) self-stimulation may suppress the detrimental influence of noise on entanglement; ii) when self-stimulation becomes effective, a classical model of parametric emission incorporating noise provides the same results of quantum theory for the expectation values involved in the separability criterion. Moreover we show that, in the macroscopic limit, it is impossible to observe violations of local …
We present a proposal for realizing local decoherence-free evolution of given entangled states of two two-level (TL) ions. For two TL ions coupled to a single heavily damped cavity, we can use engineering reservoir scheme to obtain a decoherence-free subspace which can be nonadiabatically controlled by the system and reservoir parameters. Then the local decoherence-free evolution of the entangled states are achieved. And we also discuss the relation between the geometric phases and the entanglement of the two ions under the nonadiabatic coherent evolution.
We report on the coherence of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states comprised of up to 8 qubits in the IBM ibmqx5 16-qubit quantum processor. In particular, we evaluate the coherence of GHZ states with $N=1,\ldots,8$ qubits, as a function of a delay time between state creation and measurement. We find that the decay in coherence occurs at a rate that is linear in the number of qubits. This is consistent with a model in which the dominant noise affecting the system is uncorrelated across qubits.
Decoherence effect on quantum entanglement of two optical qubits in a lossy cavity interacting with a nonlinear medium (Kerr nonlinearity) is analyzed. The qubits are assumed to be initially in the maximally entangled states (Bell or Bell-like states) or the maximally entangled mixed states, on the example of Werner and Werner-like states. Two kinds of measures of the entanglement are considered: the concurrence to describe a decay of the entanglement of formation of the qubits, and the negativity to determine a decay of the entanglement cost under positive-partial-transpose-preserving operati…
We investigate the dynamics of global entanglement, the Meyer-Wallach measure, under decoherence, analytically. We study two important class of multi-partite entangled states, the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and the W state. We obtain exact results for various models of system-environment interactions (decoherence). Our results shows distinctly different scaling behavior for these initially entangled states indicating a relative robustness of the W state, consistent with previous studies.
Maintaining coherence of a qubit is of vital importance for realizing a large-scale quantum computer in practice. In this work, we study the central spin decoherence problem in the $XXX$ central spin model (CSM) and focus on the quantum states with different initial entanglement, namely intra-bath entanglement or system-bath entanglement. We analytically obtain their evolutions of fidelity, entanglement, and quantum coherence. When the initial bath spins constitute an $N$-particle entangled state (the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-bath or the $W$-bath), the leading amplitudes of their fidelity e…
We experimentally demonstrate room-temperature storage of quantum entanglement using two nuclear spins weakly coupled to the electronic spin carried by a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. We realize universal quantum gate control over the three-qubit spin system and produce entangled states encoded within the decoherence-free subspace of the two nuclear spins. By injecting arbitrary collective noise, we demonstrate that the decoherence-free entangled state has coherence time longer than that of other entangled states by an order of magnitude in our experiment.
We address the degradation of continuous variable (CV) entanglement in a noisy channel focusing on the set of photon-number entangled states. We exploit several separability criteria and compare the resulting separation times with the value of non-Gaussianity at any time, thus showing that in the low-temperature regime: i) non-Gaussianity is a bound for the relative entropy of entanglement and ii) Simon' criterion provides a reliable estimate of the separation time also for nonGaussian states. We provide several evidences supporting the conjecture that Gaussian entanglement is the most robust …
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…
We present a model of an N-qubit channel where consecutive qubits experience correlated random rotations. Our model is an extension to the standard decoherence-free subsystems approach (DFS) which assumes that all the qubits experience the same disturbance. The variation of rotations acting on consecutive qubits is modeled as diffusion on the SU(2) group. The model may be applied to spins traveling in a varying magnetic field, or to photons passing through a fiber whose birefringence fluctuates over the time separation between photons. We derive an explicit formula describing the action of the…
The ultimate stability of atomic clocks is limited by the quantum noise of the atoms. To reduce this noise it has been suggested to use entangled atomic ensembles with reduced atomic noise. Potentially this can push the stability all the way to the limit allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation, which is denoted the Heisenberg limit. In practice, however, entangled states are often more prone to decoherence, which may prevent reaching this performance. Here we present an adaptive measurement protocol that in the presence of a realistic source of decoherence enables us to get near Heisenb…
We study the entanglement of entangled coherent states in vacuum environment by employing the entanglement of formation and propose a scheme to probabilistically teleport a coherent superposition state via entangled coherent states, in which the amount of classical information sent by Alice is restricted to one bit. The influence of decoherence due to photon absorpation is considered. It is shown that decoherence can improve the mean fidelity of probabilistic teleportation in some situations.
A pure state decoheres into a mixed state as it entangles with an environment. When an entangled two-mode system is embedded in a thermal environment, however, each mode may not be entangled with its environment by their simple linear interaction. We consider an exactly solvable model to study the dynamics of a total system, which is composed of an entangled two-mode system and a thermal environment, and also an array of infinite beam splitters. It is shown that many-body entanglement of the system and the environment plays a crucial role in the process of disentangling the system.
The possibility of detracting the decoherence due to the acceleration process of the two-qutrit system is investigated, where we examined the behaviour of the relative entropy and the non-local information. For this purpose, the accelerated subsystems are allowed to pass through local or global noisy channels. It is shown that, the detraction potential depends on the type of the used noisy channel, local or global, and the initial settings of the accelerated qutrit systems, whether it is prepared in free or bound entangled intervals. The improving rate that depicted for systems prepared in the…
Efficient and faithful implementation of quantum information tasks, e.g., quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum metrology, requires robust and state-independent decoherence-suppressing measures to protect quantum information carriers. Here we present an experimental demonstration of a robust distribution scheme in which one photon of an entangled photon pair is successfully encoded into and decoded from a decoherence-free subspace (DFS) by a state-independent scheme. We achieved a high-fidelity distribution of the entangled state over fibre communication channel, and also demons…
The decoherence of two initially entangled qubits in anisotropic band gap photonic crystal has been studied analytically without Born or Markovian approximation. It is shown that the decoherence dynamics of two qubits in photonic crystal is greatly different from that of two qubits in vacuum or subjected to usual non-Markovian reservoir. The results also show that the finite time decoherence invoked by spontaneous emission could be suppressed efficiently and the entanglement of the Bell state possesses odd parity is more easily preserved in photonic crystal than that of the Bell state possesse…
In this paper we investigate a open two-qubit model whose dynamics is not exactly solvable. When the initial state is the maximum entangled state, as the exactly solvable open two-qubit model [D. Tolkunov and V. Privman, Phys. Rev. A 71, 060308(R) (2005)], the decay of entanglement of formation of the model, expressed by concurrence is also governed by the product of suppression factors describing decoherence of the subsystems (qubits). However, if the initial state is not the maximum entangled state, its concurrence will decrease faster than the product of the suppression factors describing d…
The decoherence of two initially entangled qubits in a non-Markovian reservoir has been investigated exactly without Born Markovian approximation and rotating-wave approximation(RWA). The non-perturbative quantum master equation is derived and its exact solution is obtained. The decoherence behaviors of two qubits, initially entangled in Bell states, has been investigated in three different cases of parameters. The results show that the counter-rotating wave terms have great influence on the decoherence behavior, and there are differences between the exact solution of the Hamiltonian with RWA …
It is known that maximally entangled Bell state and three-qubit W-type states are very useful in various quantum information processing task. Thus the problem of preparation of these type of states is very important in quantum information theory. But the factor which prohibit the generation of the above mentioned pure states shared between two and three distant partners is decoherence. When we send one qubit, from a two qubit state, through decoherence channel like amplitude damping channel, the purity of the qubit is lost and it ends up with a mixed state. Therefore it is very difficult to ke…
Single-photon entanglement may be the simplest type of entanglement but it is of vice importance in quantum communication. Here we present a practical protocol for distilling the single-photon entanglement from both photon loss and decoherence. With the help of some local single photons, the probability of single photon loss can be decreased and the less-entangled state can also be recovered to maximally entangled state simultaneously. It only requires some linear optical elements which makes it feasible in current experiment condition. This protocol might find applications in current quantum …
Different from the previous works on generating entangled states, this work is focused on how to transfer the prepared entangled states onto memory qubits for protecting them against decoherence. We here consider a physical system consisting of $n$ operation qubits and $2n$ memory qubits placed in a cavity or coupled to a resonator. A method is presented for transferring $n$-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) entangled states from the operation qubits (i.e., information processing cells) onto the memory qubits (i.e., information memory elements with long decoherence time). The transferred…
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…
Considering the dipole-dipole coupling intensity between two atoms and the field in the Fock state, the entanglement dynamics between two atoms that are initially entangled in the system of two two-level atoms coupled to a single mode cavity in the presence of phase decoherence has been investigated. The two-atom entanglement appears with periodicity without considering phase decoherence, however, the phase decoherence causes the decay of entanglement between two atoms, with the increasing of the phase decoherence coefficient, the entanglement will quickly become a constant value, which is aff…
We study the time evolution of the entangled kaon system by considering the Liouville - von Neumann equation with an additional term which allows for decoherence. We choose as generators of decoherence the projectors to the 2-particle eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. Then we compare this model with the data of the CPLEAR experiment and find in this way an upper bound on the strength $λ$ of the decoherence. We also relate $λ$ to an effective decoherence parameter $ζ$ considered previously in literature. Finally we discuss our model in the light of different measures of entanglement, i.e. the von…
We report on exciton-acoustic-phonon coupling effects on the generation of exciton maximally entangled states in N=2 and 3 quantum dot systems. In particular, we address the question of the combined effect of laser pulses, appropriate for generating Bell and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger entangled states, together with decoherence mechanisms as provided by a phonon reservoir. By solving numerically the master equation for the optically driven exciton-phonon kinetics, we show that the generation of maximally entangled exciton states is preserved over a reasonable parameter window.
In a recent work (Allegra et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 100503, 2010) we addressed the evolution of photon-number entangled states in noisy Gaussian channels. Upon exploiting several non equivalent separability criteria we found evidence that entanglement of Gaussian PNES survives longer, and thus we drew a conjecture about the generality of this result. In their Comment to our work, Lee et al. use an additional entanglement criterion (NDPT) which allows them to show some counterexamples to our conjecture, i.e., nonGaussian states whose entanglement survives longer. In this reply, we argue that…
We propose an experiment in which an entangled pair of optical pulses are propagated through non-uniform gravitational fields. A field operator calculation of this situation predicts decoherence of the optical entanglement under experimentally realistic conditions.
Entangled states can potentially be used to outperform the standard quantum limit which every classical sensor is bounded by. However, entangled states are very susceptible to decoherence, and so it is not clear whether one can really create a superior sensor to classical technology via a quantum strategy which is subject to the effect of realistic noise. This paper presents an investigation of how a quantum sensor composed of many spins is affected by independent dephasing. We adopt general noise models including non-Markovian effects, and in these noise models the performance of the sensor d…
We consider a class of entangled states of a quantum system (S) and a second system (A) where pure states of the former are correlated with mixed states of the latter, and work out the entanglement measure with reference to the nearest separable state. Such `pure-mixed' entanglement is expected when the system S interacts with a macroscopic measuring apparatus in a quantum measurement, where the quantum correlation is destroyed in the process of environment-induced decoherence whereafter only the classical correlation between S and A remains, the latter being large compared to the former. We p…
We design an effect protocol for protecting the single-photon entanglement from photon loss and decoherence. The protocol only requires some auxiliary single photons and the linear optical elements. By operating the protocol, the photon loss can be effectively decreased and the less entangled single photon state can be recovered to the maximally entangled state with some probability. Moreover, the polarization information encoded in the single photon state can be perfectly contained. The protocol can be realized under current experimental condition. As the single photon entanglement is quite i…
We derive a first order differential equation for the decoherence of an orbital angular momentum entangled biphoton state propagating through a turbulent atmosphere. The derivation is based on the distortion that orbital angular momentum states experience due to propagation through a thin sheet of turbulent atmosphere. This distortion is treated as an infinitesimal transformation leading to a first order differential equation, which we call an infinitesimal propagation equation. The equation is applied to a simple qubit case to show how the entanglement decays.
Using Lindblad approach to study decoherence of quantum systems, we study the decoherence and decay of entangled states, formed by two basic states of a chain of thee qubits. We look on these states for a possible regular dependence on their decay as a function of their energy separation between the basic states under different type of environments. We found not regular or significant dependence on this energy separation for the type of environment considered .