Kwek, Leong Chuan

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering is a form of quantum nonlocality intermediate between entanglement and Bell nonlocality. Although Schro¨dinger already mooted the idea in 1935, steering still defies a complete understanding. In analogy to ‘‘all-versus-nothing’’ proofs of Bell nonlocality, here we present a proof of steering without inequalities rendering the detection of correlations leading to a violation of steering inequalities unnecessary. We show that, given any two-qubit entangled state, the existence of certain projective measurement by Alice so that Bob’s normalized conditional states can be regarded as two different pure states provides a criterion for Alice-to-Bob steerability. Asteering inequality equivalent to the all-versus-nothing proof is also obtained. Our result clearly demonstrates that there exist many quantum states which do not violate any previously known steering inequality but are indeed steerable. Our method offers advantages over the existing methods for experimentally testing steerability, and sheds new light on the asymmetric steering problem.

The quantum predictions for a single nonrelativistic spin-1/2 particle can be reproduced by noncontextual hidden variables. Here we show that quantum contextuality for a relativistic electron moving in a Coulomb potential naturally emerges if relativistic effects are taken into account. The contextuality can be identified through the violation of noncontextuality inequalities. We also discuss quantum contextuality for the free Dirac electron as well as the relativistic Dirac oscillator.

The adiabatic approximation in open systems is formulated through the effective Hamiltonian approach. By introducing an ancilla, we embed the open system dynamics into a non-Hermitian quantum dynamics of a composite system, the adiabatic evolution of the open system is then defined as the adiabatic dynamics of the composite system. Validity and invalidity conditions for this approximation are established and discussed. A High-order adiabatic approximation for open systems is introduced. As an example, the adiabatic condition for an open spin- 1 2 particle in time-dependent magnetic fields is analyzed.