Kwek, Leong Chuan

We study the state decay of two qubits interacting with a common harmonic oscillator reservoir. We find both a decoherence error and the error caused by the amplitude change of the superradiant state. We show that frequent π-phase pulses can eliminate both types of errors and therefore protect a two-qubit odd-parity state more effectively than the frequent measurement method. This shows that the methods using dynamical decoupling and the quantum Zeno effects actually can give rather different results when the operation frequency is finite.

Measurement-based quantum computation utilizes an initial entangled resource state and pro-ceeds with subsequent single-qubit measurements. It is implicitly assumed that the interactions between qubits can be switched off so that the dynamics of the measured qubits do not affect the computation. By proposing a model spin Hamiltonian, we demonstrate that measurement-based quantum computation can be achieved on a thermal state with always-on interactions. Moreover, computational errors induced by thermal fluctuations can be corrected and thus the computation can be executed fault-tolerantly if the temperature is below a threshold value.

We study the relation between the maximal violation of Svetlichny’s inequality and the mixedness of quantum states and obtain the optimal state (i.e., maximally nonlocal mixed states, or MNMS, for each value of linear entropy) to beat the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt and the Svetlichny games. For the two-qubit and three-qubit MNMS, we showed that these states are also the most tolerant state against white noise, and thus serve as valuable quantum resources for such games. In particular, the quantum prediction of the MNMS decreases as the linear entropy increases, and then ceases to be nonlocal when the linear entropy reaches the critical points 2/3 and 9/14 for the two- and three-qubit cases, respectively. The MNMS are related to classical errors in experimental preparation of maximally entangled states.

We construct an explicit Wigner function for the N-mode squeezed state. Based on a previous observation that the Wigner function describes correlations in the joint measurement of the phase-space displaced parity operator, we investigate the nonlocality of the multipartite entangled state by the violation of the Żukowski-Brukner N-qubit Bell inequality. We find that quantum predictions for such a squeezed state violate these inequalities by an amount that grows with the number N.

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.

We present numerical data showing that three-qutrit correlations for a pure state, which is not maximally entangled, violate local realism more strongly than three-qubit correlations. The strength of violation is measured by the minimal amount of noise that must be admixed to the system so that the noisy correlations have a local and realistic model.

We show a new Bell-Clauser-Horne inequality for two entangled three-dimensional quantum systems (so-called qutrits). This inequality is not violated by a maximally entangled state of two qutrits observed through a symmetric three-input- and three-output-port beam splitter only if the amount of noise in the system is greater than (11−63 √ )/2≈0.308. This result is in a perfect agreement with the previous numerical calculations presented in Kaszlikowski et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 4418 (2000)]. Moreover, we prove that for noiseless case, the necessary and sufficient condition for the threshold quantum efficiency of detectors below which there is no violation of local realism for the optimal choice of observables is equal to 6(15−43 √ )/59≈0.821. This efficiency result again agrees with the numerical predictions.

We propose to construct large quantum graph codes by means of superconducting circuits working at the ultrastrong coupling regime. In this physical scenario, we are able to create a cluster state between any pair of qubits within a fraction of a nanosecond. To exemplify our proposal, creation of the five-qubit and Steane codes is numerically simulated. We also provide optimal operating conditions with which the graph codes can be realized with state-of-the-art superconducting technologies.

We present a protocol for generating entanglement over long distances in a two-dimensional quantum network based on the surface-error-correction code. This protocol requires a fixed number of quantum memories at each node of the network and tolerates error rates of up to 1.67% in the quantum channels. If local operations are of an error rate of 10−3, error rates of about 1.27% in the quantum channels are tolerable.

The variance of an observable in a quantum state is usually used to describe Heisenberg uncertainty relation. For mixed states, the variance includes quantum and classical uncertainties. By means of the skew information and the decomposition of the variance, a stronger uncertainty relation was presented by Luo [Phys. Rev. A 72, 042110 (2005)]. In this paper, by using Wigner-Yanase-Dyson information which is a generalization of the skew information, we propose a general uncertainty relation of mixed states.