An important problem in quantum information processing is the certification of the dimension of quantum systems without making assumptions about the devices used to prepare and measure them, that is, in a device-independent manner. A crucial question is whether such certification is experimentally feasible for high-dimensional quantum systems. Here we experimentally witness in a device-independent manner the generation of six-dimensional quantum systems encoded in the orbital angular momentum of single photons and show that the same method can be scaled, at least, up to dimension 13.
An important problem in quantum information processing is the certification of the dimension of quantum systems without making assumptions about the devices used to prepare and measure them, that is, in a device-independent manner. A crucial question is whether such certification is experimentally feasible for high-dimensional quantum systems. Here we experimentally witness in a device-independent manner the generation of six-dimensional quantum systems encoded in the orbital angular momentum of single photons and show that the same method can be scaled, at least, up to dimension 13.
When increasing the dimensionality of quantum systems, high-dimensional quantum state certification becomes important in quantum information science and technology. However, how to certify ensembles of high-dimensional quantum states in a black-box scenario remains a challenging task. In this work, we report an experimental test of certifying ensembles of high-dimensional quantum states based on prepare-and-measure experiments with \textit{independent devices}, where the state preparation device and the measurement device have no shared randomness. In our experiment, the prepared quantum states are high-dimensional orbital angular momentum states of single photons, and both the preparation fidelity and the measurement fidelity are about 99.0% for the six-dimensional quantum states. We also measure the crosstalk matrices and calculate the similarity parameter for up to ten dimensions. We not only experimentally certify the ensemble of high-dimensional quantum states in a semi-device-independent manner, but also experimentally investigate the effect of atmospheric turbulent noise on high-dimensional quantum state certification. Our experimental results clearly show that the certification of high-dimensional quantum states can still be achieved even under the influence of atmospheric turbulent noise. Our findings have potential implications in quantum certification and quantum random number generation.
Certifying quantum behavior from classically accessible data is essential for secure communication and scalable quantum technologies. While powerful certification methods such as Bell nonlocality and quantum steering exist, their implementation typically requires entanglement or additional assumptions, and experimental demonstrations mainly focus on low-dimensional systems. In minimal prepare-and-measure scenarios, where a sender encodes information into quantum states and a receiver performs a single measurement, robust certification becomes particularly challenging, especially in the presence of noise and in higher-dimensional Hilbert spaces. Here, we propose, design, and experimentally implement a protocol that certifies quantumness between two distant parties without the need for preshared resources or measurement incompatibility. The experiments are carried out using the orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom of single photons, chosen for providing increased dimensionality that is scalable. We demonstrate the robustness of the protocol through rank-stability analysis of the observed correlations, which enables the certification of non-classicality even in the presence of noise. Our results provide a practical route to validate high-dimensional quantum communication systems and open new possibilities for secure and dimension-efficient quantum information processing.
Analyzing the dimension of an unknown quantum system in a device-independent manner, i.e., using only the measurement statistics, is a fundamental task in quantum physics and quantum information theory. In this paper, we consider this problem in the prepare-and-measure scenario. Specifically, we provide a lower bound on the dimension of the prepared quantum systems, which is a function that only depends on the measurement statistics. Furthermore, we show that our bound performs well in several examples. In particular, we show that our bound provides insights into the notion of dimension witness, and we also use it to show that the sets of restricted-dimensional prepare-and-measure correlations are not always convex.
Abstract The certification of entanglement dimensionality is of great importance in characterizing quantum systems. Recently, it was pointed out that quantum correlation of high-dimensional states can be simulated with a sequence of lower-dimensional states. Such a problem may render existing characterization protocols unreliable—the observed entanglement may not be a truly high-dimensional one. Here, we introduce the notion of irreducible entanglement to capture its dimensionality that is indecomposable in terms of a sequence of lower-dimensional entangled systems. We prove this new feature can be detected in a measurement-device-independent manner with an entanglement witness protocol. To demonstrate the practicability of this technique, we experimentally apply it on a 3-dimensional bipartite state, and the result certifies the existence of irreducible (at least) 3-dimensional entanglement.
Dimensionality plays an important role in various information-theoretic tasks and can be seen as a key resource for quantum information processing. In this work, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, we report an experimental test of classical and quantum dimensions in a prepare-and-measure scenario through a nonlinear dimension witness (NDW), where the preparer and the measurer have no shared randomness. We propose a theoretical method to certify whether the generated states can be decomposed as products of lower dimensional states with the NDW, certify the dimension of the high-dimensional system, and identify whether the quantum system is irreducible in a unified picture in our experiment. To demonstrate the practicability of this method, we experimentally witness the generation of classical and quantum systems encoded in the high-dimensional orbital angular momentum (OAM) state under the effects of atmospheric turbulence. Our results show that this nonlinear dimension witness is highly robust and can be used in the presence of noise and low detection efficiency; hence, we estimate the dimension in our experiment in a detection-loophole-free manner through the NDW. We believe our work opens new avenues for dimension witnesses, especially for device-independent estimation of quantum systems and quantum communications.
High-dimensional entanglement offers significant advantages over its low-dimensional counterpart in various information-processing tasks. However, to harness these advantages, it is crucial that the quantum channels used to store or transmit the subsystems of an entangled system not only preserve entanglement but also maintain its dimensionality above a certain threshold. The maximum entanglement dimension that a channel can preserve is referred to as its effective dimensionality, since the channel cannot be used to transmit information of dimension greater than that in a single use. In this work, we present a method to certify whether a quantum channel can preserve entanglement dimension above a given threshold. Unlike existing approaches, our method is faithful, i.e., it can be applied to any channel, and avoids common assumptions such as preparation of entangled states, auxiliary side channels, or perfect measurement devices. Moreover, the method can be extended to faithfully certify other classes of non-resource-breaking channels, such as non-nonpositive-partial-transpose-breaking channels (non-NPT-breaking channels). Finally, we discuss possible experimental realizations of our certification scheme through explicit examples.