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arXiv:2105.06854 · Advanced Quantum Technologies

Experimental Progress on Quantum Coherence: Detection, Quantification, and Manipulation

Kang‐Da Wu, Alexander Streltsov, Bartosz Regula, Guo‐Yong Xiang, Chuan‐Feng Li, Guang‐Can Guo

Published Jul 13, 2021• 67 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Quantum coherence is a fundamental property of quantum systems, separating quantum from classical physics. Recently, there has been significant interest in the characterization of quantum coherence as a resource, investigating how coherence can be extracted and used for quantum technological applications. In this work, the progress of this research is reviewed, focusing in particular on recent experimental efforts. After a brief review of the underlying theory, the main platforms for realizing the experiments are discussed: linear optics, nuclear magnetic resonance, and superconducting systems. Experimental detection and quantification of coherence, experimental state conversion and coherence distillation, and experiments investigating the dynamics of quantum coherence are then considered. Experiments exploring the connections between coherence and uncertainty relations, path information, and coherence of operations and measurements are also reviewed. Experimental efforts on multipartite and multilevel coherence are also discussed.

DOI
10.1002/qute.202100040

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Abstract Quantum coherence is a fundamental property of quantum systems, separating quantum from classical physics. Recently, there has been significant interest in the characterization of quantum coherence as a resource, investigating how coherence can be extracted and used for quantum technological applications. In this work, the progress of this research is reviewed, focusing in particular on recent experimental efforts. After a brief review of the underlying theory, the main platforms for realizing the experiments are discussed: linear optics, nuclear magnetic resonance, and superconducting systems. Experimental detection and quantification of coherence, experimental state conversion and coherence distillation, and experiments investigating the dynamics of quantum coherence are then considered. Experiments exploring the connections between coherence and uncertainty relations, path information, and coherence of operations and measurements are also reviewed. Experimental efforts on multipartite and multilevel coherence are also discussed.
Quantum coherence and quantum correlations are of fundamental and practical significance for the development of quantum mechanics.They are also cornerstones of quantum computation and quantum communication theory. Searching physically meaningful and mathematically rigorous quantifiers of them are long-standing concerns of the community of quantum information science, and various faithful measures have been introduced so far. We review in this paper the measures of discordlike quantum correlations for bipartite and multipartite systems, the measures of quantum coherence for any single quantum system, and their relationship in different settings. Our aim is to provide a full review about the resource theory of quantum coherence, including its application in many-body systems, and the discordlike quantum correlations which were defined based on the various distance measures of states. We discuss the interrelations between quantum coherence and quantum correlations established in an operational way, and the fundamental characteristics of quantum coherence such as their complementarity under different basis sets, their duality with path information of an interference experiment, their distillation and dilution under different operations, and some new viewpoints of the superiority of the quantum algorithms from the perspective of quantum coherence. Additionally, we review properties of geometric quantum correlations and quantum coherence under noisy quantum channels. Finally, the main progresses for the study of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in the relativistic settings are reviewed. All these results provide an overview for the conceptual implications and basic connections of quantum coherence, quantum correlations, and their potential applications in various related subjects of physics.
Quantum computation provides a great speedup over its classical counterpart in solving some hard problems. The advantages of quantum computation come from the coherent superposition principle of quantum mechanics. Spin system is one of the most significant candidates to realize quantum computation. In this review, we focus on the recent experimental progress related to quantum coherence and some fundamental concepts such as the uncertainty principle in the spin systems. We shall first briefly introduce the quantum description of qubit, coherence, and decoherence. Based on this picture, preserving quantum coherence and detection of weak magnetic fields are presented. We also discuss the realization of precise quantum coherent control, adiabatic quantum factorization algorithm, and two aspects of uncertainty relations.
Quantum coherence, present whenever a quantum system exists in a superposition of multiple classically distinct states, marks one of the fundamental departures from classical physics.Quantum coherence has recently been investigated rigorously within a resource-theoretic formalism.However, the finer-grained notion of multilevel coherence, which explicitly takes into account the number of superposed classical states, has remained relatively unexplored.A comprehensive analysis of multilevel coherence, which acts as the singleparty analogue to multipartite entanglement, is essential for understanding natural quantum processes as well as for gauging the performance of quantum technologies.Here, we develop the theoretical and experimental groundwork for characterizing and quantifying multilevel coherence.We prove that nontrivial levels of purity are required for multilevel coherence, as there is a ball of states around the maximally mixed state that do not exhibit multilevel coherence in any basis.We provide a simple, necessary, and sufficient analytical criterion to verify the presence of multilevel coherence, which leads to a complete classification of multilevel coherence for three-level systems.We present the robustness of multilevel coherence, a bona fide quantifier, which we show to be numerically computable via semidefinite programming and experimentally accessible via multilevel coherence witnesses, which we introduce and characterize.We further verify and lower bound the robustness of multilevel coherence by performing a semi-device-independent phase discrimination task, which is implemented experimentally with four-level quantum probes in a photonic setup.Our results contribute to understanding the operational relevance of genuine multilevel coherence, also by demonstrating the key role it plays in enhanced phase discrimination-a primitive for quantum communication and metrology-and suggest new ways to reliably and effectively test the quantum behavior of physical systems.
Quantum coherence is not only a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics, but also an important physical resource for quantum information processing. Along with the formulation of the resource theoretic framework of quantum coherence, the quantification of coherence is still one of the recent research focuses. Quantum coherence is also very fragile, and the environmental noise usually induces a system to decohere. Hence it is also an important subject to make clear the dynamical behavior and to seek a flexible way of preserving quantum coherence of an open quantum system. Besides, there are many potential applications of quantum coherence in quantum many-body system, quantum thermodynamics, quantum biology and other related fields. We review in this paper the resource theoretic framework for quantifying coherence and the relevant quantum coherence measures defined within this framework which includes the relative entropy of coherence, the l1 norm of coherence, the entanglement-based measure of coherence, the convex roof measure of coherence, and the robustness of coherence. We also review the dynamical behaviors of quantum coherence for certain open quantum systems, the coherence generating and breaking power of typical quantum channels, and the freezing phenomenon of quantum coherence. Moreover, we exemplify applications of quantum coherence in Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, Grover search algorithms, and the study of quantum phase transitions in multipartite systems. We hope that these results may provide not only an overview of the relevant field, but also an outlook of the future research direction of this exciting field.
Coherence is a basic phenomenon in quantum mechanics and considered to be an essential resource in quantum information processing. Although the quantification of coherence has attracted a lot of interest, the lack of efficient methods to measure the coherence in experiments limits the applications. We address this problem by introducing an experiment-friendly method for coherence and spectrum estimation. This method is based on the theory of majorization and can not only be used to prove the presence of coherence, but also result in a rather precise lower bound of the amount of coherence. As an illustration, we show how to characterize the freezing phenomenon of coherence with only two local measurements for any NNN-qubit quantum systems. Our approach also has other applications in quantum information processing, such as the characterization of distillability and entanglement transformations.
Quantum coherence is a fundamental resource that quantum technologies exploit to achieve performance beyond that of classical devices. A necessary prerequisite to achieve this advantage is the ability of measurement devices to detect coherence from the measurement statistics. Based on a recently developed resource theory of quantum operations, here we quantify experimentally the ability of a typical quantum-optical detector, the weak-field homodyne detector, to detect coherence. We derive an improved algorithm for quantum detector tomography and apply it to reconstruct the positive-operator-valued measures of the detector in different configurations. The reconstructed positive-operator-valued measures are then employed to evaluate how well the detector can detect coherence using two computable measures. As the first experimental investigation of quantum measurements from a resource theoretical perspective, our work sheds new light on the rigorous evaluation of the performance of a quantum measurement apparatus.