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arXiv:1407.5748 · Physical Review A

Multiple phase estimation in quantum cloning machines

Yao Yao, Li Ge, Xing Mao Xiao, Xiaoguang Wang, Chang-Pu Sun

Published Aug 25, 2014• 31 citations

Abstract

Since the initial discovery of the Wootters-Zurek no-cloning theorem, a wide variety of quantum cloning machines have been proposed aiming at imperfect but optimal cloning of quantum states within its own context. Remarkably, most previous studies have employed the Bures fidelity or the Hilbert-Schmidt norm as the figure of merit to characterize the quality of the corresponding cloning scenarios. However, in many situations, what we truly care about is the relevant information about certain parameters encoded in quantum states. In this work, we investigate the multiple phase estimation problem in the framework of quantum cloning machines, from the perspective of quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM). Focusing on the generalized $d$-dimensional equatorial states, we obtain the analytical formulas of QFIM for both universal quantum cloning machine (UQCM) and phase-covariant quantum cloning machine (PQCM), and prove that PQCM indeed performs better than UQCM in terms of QFIM. We highlight that our method can be generalized to arbitrary cloning schemes where the fidelity between the single-copy input and output states is input-state independent. Furthermore, the attainability of the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound is also explicitly discussed.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.90.022327

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Since the initial discovery of the Wootters-Zurek no-cloning theorem, a wide variety of quantum cloning machines have been proposed aiming at imperfect but optimal cloning of quantum states within its own context. Remarkably, most previous studies have employed the Bures fidelity or the Hilbert-Schmidt norm as the figure of merit to characterize the quality of the corresponding cloning scenarios. However, in many situations, what we truly care about is the relevant information about certain parameters encoded in quantum states. In this work, we investigate the multiple phase estimation problem in the framework of quantum cloning machines, from the perspective of quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM). Focusing on the generalized

d

-dimensional equatorial states, we obtain the analytical formulas of QFIM for both universal quantum cloning machine (UQCM) and phase-covariant quantum cloning machine (PQCM), and prove that PQCM indeed performs better than UQCM in terms of QFIM. We highlight that our method can be generalized to arbitrary cloning schemes where the fidelity between the single-copy input and output states is input-state independent. Furthermore, the attainability of the quantum Cram'er-Rao bound is also explicitly discussed.

The optimal phase-covariant quantum cloning machine (PQCM) broadcasts the information associated to an input qubit into a multiqubit system, exploiting a partial a priori knowledge of the input state. This additional a priori information leads to a higher fidelity than for the universal cloning. The present article first analyzes different innovative schemes to implement the $1\ensuremath{\rightarrow}3$ PQCM. The method is then generalized to any $1\ensuremath{\rightarrow}M$ machine for an odd value of

M

by a theoretical approach based on the general angular momentum formalism. Finally different experimental schemes based either on linear or nonlinear methods and valid for single photon polarization encoded qubits are discussed.

In several quantum information (QI) phenomena of large technological importance the information is carried by the phase of the quantum superposition states, or qubits. The phase-covariant cloning machine (PQCM) addresses precisely the problem of optimally copying these qubits with the largest attainable ``fidelity.'' We present a general scheme which realizes the $1\ensuremath{\rightarrow}3$ phase covariant cloning process by a combination of three different QI processes: the universal cloning, the NOT gate, and the projection over the symmetric subspace of the output qubits. The experimental implementation of a PQCM for polarization encoded qubits, the first ever realized with photons, is reported.

Perfect cloning of an unknown quantum state is impossible. Approximate cloning, which is optimal in various senses, has been found in many cases. Paradigmatic examples are Wootters-Zurek cloning and universal cloning. These cloning machines aim at optimal cloning of the full quantum states. However, in practice, what is important and relevant may only involve partial information in quantum states, rather than quantum states themselves. For example, signals are often encoded as parameters in quantum states, whose information content is well synthesized by quantum Fisher information. This raises the basic issue of evaluating the information transferring capability (e.g., distributing quantum Fisher information) of quantum cloning. We assess and compare Wootters-Zurek cloning and universal cloning from this perspective and show that, on average, Wootters-Zurek cloning performs better than universal cloning for the phase (as well as amplitude) parameter, although they are incomparable individually, and universal cloning has many advantages over Wootters-Zurek cloning in other contexts. Physical insights and related issues are further discussed.

An unknown quantum state cannot be copied and broadcast freely due to the no-cloning theorem. Approximate cloning schemes have been proposed to achieve the optimal cloning characterized by the maximal fidelity between the original and its copies. Here, from the perspective of quantum Fisher information (QFI), we investigate the distribution of QFI in asymmetric cloning machines which produce two nonidentical copies. As one might expect, improving the QFI of one copy results in decreasing the QFI of the other copy. It is perhaps also unsurprising that asymmetric phase-covariant cloning outperforms universal cloning in distributing QFI since a priori information of the input state has been utilized. However, interesting results appear when we compare the distributabilities of fidelity (which quantifies the full information of quantum states), and QFI (which only captures the information of relevant parameters) in asymmetric cloning machines. Unlike the results of fidelity, where the distributability of symmetric cloning is always optimal for any d-dimensional cloning, we find that any asymmetric cloning outperforms symmetric cloning on the distribution of QFI for d ≤ 18, whereas some but not all asymmetric cloning strategies could be worse than symmetric ones when d > 18.

Following the work of Niu and Griffiths, in \emph{Phys.Rev.A 58, 4377(1998)}, we shall investigate the problem, how to design the optimal quantum cloning machines (QCMs) for qubit system, with the help of Bloch-sphere representation. In stead of the quality factor there, the Fiuráusek's optimal condition, where the optimal cloning machine should maximize a convex mixture of the average fidelity, is used as the optimality criterion in present protocol. Almost all of the known optimal QCMs in previous works, the cloning for states with fixed polar angle, the phase-covariant cloning, the universal QCMs, the cloning for two arbitrary pure states, and the mirror phase-covariant cloning, should be discussed in a systematic way. The known results, the optimal fidelities for various input ensembles according to different optimality criteria, are recovered here. Our present scheme also offers a general way of constructing the unitary transformation to realize the optimal cloning.

We experimentally realize the $1\ensuremath{\rightarrow}2$ optimal universal quantum cloning machine for arbitrary qubits and the ancilla-free $1\ensuremath{\rightarrow}3$ optimal phase-covariant quantum cloning machine for $x\text{\ensuremath{-}}y$ equatorial qubits, which were constructed by Zou et al. [Phys. Lett. A 366, 36 (2007)]. The qubits are represented by the polarization states of photons prepared from the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The copies of each machine are shown to have almost equal fidelities conditioned on fourfold coincidences.