We introduce a multiparty cryptographic protocol, which we call entanglement sharing schemes, wherein a dealer retains half of a maximally entangled bipartite state and encodes the other half into a multipartite state that is distributed among multiple players. In a close analog to quantum secret sharing, some subsets of players can recover maximal entanglement with the dealer whereas other subsets can recover no entanglement (though they may retain classical correlations with the dealer). We find a lower bound on the share size for such schemes and construct two nontrivial examples based on Shor's $[[9,1,3]]$ and the $[[4,2,2]]$ stabilizer code; we further demonstrate how other examples may be obtained from quantum error correcting codes through classical encryption. Finally, we demonstrate that entanglement sharing schemes can be applied to characterize leaked information in quantum ramp secret sharing.
We introduce a multiparty cryptographic protocol, which we call entanglement sharing schemes, wherein a dealer retains half of a maximally entangled bipartite state and encodes the other half into a multipartite state that is distributed among multiple players. In a close analog to quantum secret sharing, some subsets of players can recover maximal entanglement with the dealer whereas other subsets can recover no entanglement (though they may retain classical correlations with the dealer). We find a lower bound on the share size for such schemes and construct two nontrivial examples based on Shor's [[9,1,3]] and the [[4,2,2]] stabilizer code; we further demonstrate how other examples may be obtained from quantum error correcting codes through classical encryption. Finally, we demonstrate that entanglement sharing schemes can be applied to characterize leaked information in quantum ramp secret sharing.
Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information.The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality; with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered.Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists; the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information.Here by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%.By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion.Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which demonstrates that our implemented scheme is fully quantum.Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the 5-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.
Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share a certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information. The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality: with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered. Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists: the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information. Here, by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%. By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which shows that our implemented scheme is fully quantum. Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the five-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.
A quantum secret sharing scheme is a cryptographic protocol by which a dealer can share a secret among a group of n players so that only certain subsets of players can recover the secret by collaboration. In this paper we propose communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing schemes. They minimize the amount of quantum communication required to reconstruct the secret when more than the necessary number of players collaborate. They are based on a class of staircase codes proposed by Bitar and El Rouayheb. In a standard ((k,n)) quantum threshold scheme, any subset of k or more players can recover the secret. The quantum communication cost for reconstruction in such schemes is k qudits for each secret qudit. Using the proposed construction, any subset of $d\ensuremath{\ge}k$ players can also collaborate to recover the secret with a communication cost of d qudits for $d\ensuremath{-}k+1$ secret qudits. In other words, for the proposed schemes the quantum communication cost is only $\frac{d}{d\ensuremath{-}k+1}$ qudits for every secret qudit. For d>k, proposed schemes are communication efficient with respect to standard schemes; and when $d=2k\ensuremath{-}1$, the quantum communication cost is reduced by a factor O(k). Further, when $n=2k\ensuremath{-}1$, the proposed schemes have optimal communication cost for secret reconstruction.
We investigate quantum secret-sharing schemes constructed from ${[[n,k,\ensuremath{\delta}]]}_{D}$ nonbinary stabilizer quantum error-correcting codes with carrier qudits of prime dimension D. We provide a systematic way of determining the access structure, which completely determines the forbidden and intermediate structures. We then show that the information available to the intermediate structure can be fully described and quantified by what we call the information group, a subgroup of the Pauli group of k qudits, and we employ this group structure to construct a method for hiding the information from the intermediate structure via twirling of the information group and sharing of classical bits between the dealer and the players. Our scheme allows for the transformation of a ramp (intermediate) quantum secret-sharing scheme into a semiquantum perfect secret-sharing scheme with the same access structure as the ramp one but without any intermediate subsets, and is optimal in the amount of classical bits the dealer has to distribute.
Quantum secret-sharing and quantum error-correction schemes rely on multipartite decoding protocols, yet the nonlocal operations involved are challenging and sometimes infeasible. Here we construct a quantum secret-sharing protocol with a reduced number of quantum communication channels between the players. We introduce a scheme based on embedding a classical linear code into a quantum error-correcting code and then mapping the latter to a quantum secret-sharing protocol. In contrast to the Calderbank-Shor-Steane construction, we do not impose any restriction on the classical code; our protocol works with any arbitrary linear code. Our work paves the way towards the more general problem of simplifying the decoding of quantum error-correcting codes.
Most applications in quantum information processing make either explicit or implicit use of entanglement. It is thus important to have a good understanding of entanglement and the role it plays in these protocols. However, especially when it comes to multipartite entanglement, there still remain a lot of mysteries. This thesis is devoted to getting a better understanding of multipartite entanglement, and its role in various quantum information protocols.\n\nFirst, we investigate transformations between multipartite entangled states that only use local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We mostly focus on three qubit states in the GHZ class, and derive upper and lower bounds for the successful transformation probability between two states.\n\nWe then focus on absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states, which are highly entangled multipartite states that have the property that they are maximally entangled for any bipartition. With them as a resource, we develop new parallel teleportation protocols, which can then be used to implement quantum secret sharing (QSS) schemes. We further prove the existence of AME states for any number of parties, if the dimension of the involved quantum systems is chosen appropriately. An equivalence between threshold QSS schemes and AME states shared between an even number of parties is established, and further protocols are designed, such as constructing ramp QSS schemes and open-destination teleportation protocols with AME states as a resource.\n\nAs a framework to work with AME states, graph states are explored. They allow for efficient bipartite entanglement verification, which makes them a promising candidate for the description of AME states. We show that for all currently known AME states, absolutely maximally entangled graph states can be found, and we were even able to use graph states to find a new AME state for seven three-dimensional systems (qutrits). In addition, the implementation of QSS schemes from AME states can be conveniently described within the graph state formalism.\n\nFinally, we use the insight gained from entanglement in QSS schemes to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for quantum erasure channel and quantum error correction codes that satisfy the quantum Singleton bound, as these codes are closely related to ramp QSS schemes. This provides us with a very intuitive approach to codes for the quantum erasure channel, purely based on the entanglement required to protect information against losses by use of the parallel teleportation protocol.