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arXiv:2009.07613 · Quantum Science and Technology

The controlled SWAP test for determining quantum entanglement

Steph Foulds, Viv M. Kendon, Timothy P. Spiller

Published Feb 9, 2021• 52 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Quantum entanglement is essential to the development of quantum computation, communications, and technology. The controlled SWAP test, widely used for state comparison, can be adapted to an efficient and useful test for entanglement of a pure state. Here we show that the test can evidence the presence of entanglement (and further, genuine n-qubit entanglement), can distinguish entanglement classes, and that the concurrence of a two-qubit state is related to the test’s output probabilities. We also propose a multipartite measure of entanglement that acts similarly for n-qubit states. The average number of copies of the test state required to detect entanglement decreases for larger systems, to four on average for many (n ≳ 8) qubits for maximally entangled states. For non-maximally entangled states, the number of copies required to detect entanglement increases with decreasing entanglement. Furthermore, the results are robust to second order when typical small errors are introduced to the state under investigation.

DOI
10.1088/2058-9565/abe458

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Abstract Quantum entanglement is essential to the development of quantum computation, communications, and technology. The controlled SWAP test, widely used for state comparison, can be adapted to an efficient and useful test for entanglement of a pure state. Here we show that the test can evidence the presence of entanglement (and further, genuine n-qubit entanglement), can distinguish entanglement classes, and that the concurrence of a two-qubit state is related to the test’s output probabilities. We also propose a multipartite measure of entanglement that acts similarly for n-qubit states. The average number of copies of the test state required to detect entanglement decreases for larger systems, to four on average for many (n ≳ 8) qubits for maximally entangled states. For non-maximally entangled states, the number of copies required to detect entanglement increases with decreasing entanglement. Furthermore, the results are robust to second order when typical small errors are introduced to the state under investigation.
Abstract Quantum entanglement plays a key role in the field of quantum computing and quantum communication. The controlled SWAP test has been used to detect pure state entanglement ( Foulds S. et al. Quantum Sci. Technol. , 6 (2021) 035002; Beckey J. L. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. , 127 (2021) 140501). In this paper, we investigate that quantum circuits for controlled SWAP test can be used to detect the entanglement of multipartite mixed state. Based on the measured probability, we propose entanglement criteria for detecting multipartite entanglement and genuine entanglement of pure states. In addition, we give representation of the entanglement measures based on the measured probability of the controlled SWAP tests. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the efficiency of the entanglement criteria.
Quantum entanglement is an essential resource for quantum technologies, and the controlled swap test provides a versatile tool for its detection and quantification. Here, we propose a SWAP-based entanglement witness that applies to arbitrary two-qubit states - both pure and mixed - and provides a lower bound on the concurrence. The method is resource-efficient, robust to noise, and platform-independent. As an example, we validate the approach on a room-temperature photonic chip, where the swap test is carried out using only linear and well-established integrated optical components. The robustness of the method against photonic-hardware noise is also analysed. Our results establish a simple and reliable tool for entanglement witnessing.
Recently, a technique known as quantum symmetry test has gained increasing attention for detecting bipartite entanglement in pure quantum states. In this work we show that, beyond qualitative detection, a family of well-defined measures of bipartite and multipartite entanglement can be obtained with symmetry tests. We propose and benchmark several efficient methods to estimate these measures, and derive near-optimal sampling strategies for each. Despite the nonlinearity of the methods, we demonstrate that the sampling error scales no worse than O(Ntot−1/2)O(N_{\mathrm{tot}}^{-1/2})O(Ntot−1/2​) with the total number of copies NtotN_{\mathrm{tot}}Ntot​, which suggests experimental feasibility. By exploiting symmetries we compute our measures for large number of copies, and derive the asymptotic decay exponents for relevant states in many-body systems. Using these results we identify tradeoffs between estimation complexity and sensitivity of the presented entanglement measures, oriented to practical implementations.
The controlled SWAP test for detecting and quantifying entanglement applied to pure qubit states is robust to small errors in the states and efficient for large multi-qubit states (Foulds et al . 2021 Quantum Sci. Technol . 6 , 035002 (doi: 10.1088/2058-9565/abe458 )). We extend this, and the related measure concentratable entanglement (CE), to enable important practical applications in quantum information processing. We investigate the lower bound of concentratable entanglement given in (Beckey et al . 2023 Phys. Rev. A 107 , 062425 (doi: 10.1103/physreva.107.062425 )) and conjecture an upper bound of the mixed-state concentratable entanglement that is robust to c-SWAP test errors. Since experimental states are always slightly mixed, our work makes the c-SWAP test and CE measure suitable for application in experiments to characterize entanglement. We further present the CE of some key higher-dimensional states such as qudit states and entangled optical states to validate the CE as a higher-dimensional measure of entanglement. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The quantum theory of light’.
The nonlocal correlations between quantum states in an entangled system are essential to many quantum communications applications. A basic quantum operation, which permits the distribution of entanglement between two initially uncorrelated systems, is entanglement swapping. Here we present a rigorous formulation of entanglement swapping of any two partially mixed two-qubit states without limiting ourselves to any specific type of state or noise. Further, for two important classes of the input states, Bell diagonal and pure states, we describe how the concurrence of the final state is related to the concurrence of the initial states. First, we consider Bell diagonal states, and find bounds on the concurrence of the final state in terms of the concurrences of the initial states. These bounds are important for communications applications because polarization mode dispersion in fibers produces Bell diagonal states up to a local unitary rotation. Second, we show that swapping pure states occasionally results in a state of higher concurrence than either of the initial states. In addition, we find that two pure states are most likely to be capable of swapping to a state of increased concurrence when the two initial states have similar concurrences. Our analysis offers a completely general framework for investigating the behavior of any pair of two-qubit states when used for entanglement swapping.
Entanglement swapping is gaining widespread attention due to its application in entanglement distribution among different parts of quantum appliances. We investigate the entanglement swapping for pure and noisy systems, and argue different entanglement quantifiers for quantum states. We explore the relationship between the entanglement of initial states and the average entanglement of final states in terms of concurrence and negativity. We find that if initial quantum states are maximally entangled and we make measurements in the Bell basis, then average concurrence and average negativity of final states give similar results. In this case, we simply obtain the average concurrence (average negativity) of the final states by taking the product of concurrences (negativities) of the initial states. However, the measurement in non-maximally entangled basis during entanglement swapping degrades the average swapped entanglement. Further, the product of the entanglement of the initial mixed states provides an upper bound to the average swapped entanglement of final states obtained after entanglement swapping. The negativity work well for weak entangled noisy states but concurrence gives better results for relatively strong entanglement regimes. We also discuss how successfully the output state can be used as a channel for the teleportation of an unknown qubit.