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.

We investigate the inverse problem concerning the evolution of a qubit system, specifically we consider how one can establish the Hamiltonians that account for the evolution of a qubit along a prescribed path in the projected Hilbert space. For a given path, there are infinite Hamiltonians which can realize the same evolution. A general form of the Hamiltonians is constructed in which one may select the desired one for implementing a prescribed evolution. This scheme can be generalized to higher dimensional systems.

A cluster state cannot be a unique ground state of a two-body interacting Hamiltonian. Here, we propose the creation of a cluster state of logical qubits encoded in spin-1/2 particles by adiabatically weakening two-body interactions. The proposal is valid for any spatial dimensional cluster states. Errors induced by thermal fluctuations and adiabatic evolution within finite time can be eliminated ensuring fault-tolerant quantum computing schemes.

The security of a cryptographic key that is generated by communication through a noisy quantum channel relies on the ability to distill a shorter secure key sequence from a longer insecure one. We show that—for protocols that use quantum channels of any dimension and completely characterize them by state tomography—the noise threshold for classical advantage distillation of a specific kind is substantially lower than the threshold for quantum entanglement distillation if the eavesdropper can perform powerful coherent attacks. In marked contrast, earlier investigations had shown that the thresholds are identical for incoherent attacks on the same classical distillation scheme. It remains an open question whether other schemes for classical advantage distillation have higher thresholds for coherent eavesdropping attacks.

The calculation of off-diagonal matrix elements has various applications in fields such as nuclear physics and quantum chemistry. In this paper, we present a noisy intermediate scale quantum algorithm for estimating the diagonal and off-diagonal matrix elements of a generic observable in the energy eigenbasis of a given Hamiltonian without explicitly preparing its eigenstates. By means of numerical simulations we show that this approach finds many of the matrix elements for the one and two qubits cases. Specifically, while in the first case, one can initialize the ansatz parameters over a broad interval, in the latter the optimization landscape can significantly slow down the speed of convergence and one should therefore be careful to restrict the initialization to a smaller range of parameters.

A Bose-Einstein condensate confined in ring shaped lattices interrupted by a weak link and pierced by an effective magnetic flux defines the atomic counterpart of the superconducting quantum interference device: the atomtronic quantum interference device (AQUID). In this paper, we report on the detection of current states in the system through a self-heterodyne protocol. Following the original proposal of the NIST and Paris groups, the ring-condensate many-body wave function interferes with a reference condensate expanding from the center of the ring. We focus on the rf AQUID which realizes effective qubit dynamics. Both the Bose-Hubbard and Gross-Pitaevskii dynamics are studied. For the Bose-Hubbard dynamics, we demonstrate that the self-heterodyne protocol can be applied, but higher-order correlations in the evolution of the interfering condensates are measured to readout of the current states of the system. We study how states with macroscopic quantum coherence can be told apart analyzing the noise in the time of flight of the ring condensate.

We show that the pulse matching phenomenon can be obtained in the general multilevel system with electromagnetically induced transparency. For this we find a different way to create tightly localized stationary pulses by using counterpropagating pump fields. The present process is a spatial compression of excitation so that it allows us to shape and further intensify the localized stationary pulses, without using standing waves of pump fields or spatially modulated pump fields.

Quantum synchronization has been a central topic in quantum nonlinear dynamics. Despite the rapid development in this field, very few have studied how to efficiently boost synchronization. Homodyne measurement emerges as one of the successful candidates for this task but preferably in the semiclassical regime. In our work, we focus on the phase synchronization of a harmonic-driven quantum Stuart–Landau oscillator and show that the enhancement induced by homodyne measurement persists into the quantum regime. Interestingly, optimal two-photon damping rates exist when the oscillator and driving are at resonance and with a small single-photon damping rate. We also report noise-induced enhancement in quantum synchronization when the single-photon damping rate is sufficiently large. Apart from these results, we discover that adding a squeezing Hamiltonian can further boost synchronization, especially in the semiclassical regime. Furthermore, the addition of squeezing causes the optimal two-photon pumping rates to shift and converge.

We propose a protocol for the creation of photonic Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and linear cluster states emitted from a single atom—or ion— coupled to an optical cavity field. The method is based on laser pulses with different polarizations and exploits the atomic transition amplitudes to state-selectively achieve the desired transitions. The scheme lies within reach of current technology.

Multicomponent correlation functions are developed by utilizing d -outcome measurements. Based on multicomponent correlation functions, we propose a Bell inequality for bipartite d -dimensional systems. Violation of the Bell inequality for continuous-variable (CV) systems is investigated. The violation of maximally entangled states can exceed the Cirel’son bound; the maximal violation is 2.969 81. For finite values of the squeezing parameter, the violation strength of CV states increases with dimension d . Numerical results show that the violation strength of CV states with finite squeezing parameters is stronger than that of maximally entangled states.