Abstract Quantum steering, a type of quantum correlation with unique asymmetry, has important applications in asymmetric quantum information tasks. We consider a new quantum steering scenario in which one half of a two-qubit Werner state is sequentially measured by multiple Alices and the other half by multiple Bobs. We find that the maximum number of Alices who can share steering with a single Bob increases from 2 to 5 when the number of measurement settings N increases from 2 to 16. Furthermore, we find a counterintuitive phenomenon that for a fixed N, at most 2 Alices can share steering with 2 Bobs, while 4 or more Alices are allowed to share steering with a single Bob. We further analyze the robustness of the steering sharing by calculating the required purity of the initial Werner state, the lower bound of which varies from 0.503(1) to 0.979(5). Finally, we show that our both-sides sequential steering sharing scheme can be applied to control the steering ability, even the steering direction, if an initial asymmetric state or asymmetric measurement is adopted. Our work gives insights into the diversity of steering sharing and can be extended to study the problems such as genuine multipartite quantum steering when the sequential unsharp measurement is applied.
Abstract Quantum steering, a type of quantum correlation with unique asymmetry, has important applications in asymmetric quantum information tasks. We consider a new quantum steering scenario in which one half of a two-qubit Werner state is sequentially measured by multiple Alices and the other half by multiple Bobs. We find that the maximum number of Alices who can share steering with a single Bob increases from 2 to 5 when the number of measurement settings N increases from 2 to 16. Furthermore, we find a counterintuitive phenomenon that for a fixed N, at most 2 Alices can share steering with 2 Bobs, while 4 or more Alices are allowed to share steering with a single Bob. We further analyze the robustness of the steering sharing by calculating the required purity of the initial Werner state, the lower bound of which varies from 0.503(1) to 0.979(5). Finally, we show that our both-sides sequential steering sharing scheme can be applied to control the steering ability, even the steering direction, if an initial asymmetric state or asymmetric measurement is adopted. Our work gives insights into the diversity of steering sharing and can be extended to study the problems such as genuine multipartite quantum steering when the sequential unsharp measurement is applied.
Quantum steering exhibits an inherent asymmetric property that differs from both quantum entanglement and Bell nonlocality, which leads to no-way, one-way, and two-way steering. Flexibly manipulating the direction of quantum steering without reducing the quantum steerability is very important for information processing. In this paper, implementing sequential unsharp measurements and the steering-radius criterion, we show how to manipulate that steering direction among multiple Alices and Bobs. We demonstrate that the change in steering direction depends on the number of measurement settings and the sharpness of measurements. For a given two-qubit asymmetric state, we obtain 13 kinds of steering regions with different steering directions in the case of one Alice and three Bobs and obtain 11 kinds in the case with two Alices and two Bobs. For the case with one Alice and three Bobs, we further find a volume bound to visualize quantum steering. Our manipulation scheme is experimentally easy to achieve and rather assigns the steerability to more observers without reducing it, which offers a direct reference for the practical application of quantum steering.
Quantum mechanics puts a restriction on the number of observers who can simultaneously steer another observer's system, known as the monogamy of steering. In this work, we find the limit of the number of observers (Bobs) who can steer another party's (Alice's) system, invoking a scenario where half of an entangled pair is shared between a single Alice in one wing and several Bobs on the other wing, who act sequentially and independently of each other. When all the observers measure two dichotomic observables, we find that two Bobs can steer Alice's system, going beyond the monogamy restriction. We further show that three Bobs can steer Alice's system, considering a three-settings linear steering inequality, and then conjecture that, at most, n Bobs can demonstrate steering of Alice's system when steering is probed through an n-settings linear steering inequality.
The problem of sharing quantum correlations is an interesting problem in the study of quantum information theory. Silva et al. proposed the study of sharing quantum nonlocality at first. They studied the fundamental limits on nonlocality, asking whether a single pair of entangled qubits could generate a long sequence of nonlocal correlations. At the same time, the sequential scenario was also introduced first, in which Alice and Bob each have half of a pair of entangled qubit states. The first Bob measures his half and then passes his part to a second Bob who measures again and so on. Obviously, even partial preservation of entanglement in a shared state in spite of a few sequences of local operations performed by the sharing parties can be important for information processing schemes in which entanglement is utilized as a resource. Thus, the problem of sharing quantum entanglement has also been extensively investigated. Recently, Srivastava et al. proved that there exist a class of T-states whose entanglement can be shared by arbitrarily many independent observers in [ Phys. Rev. A 2022 105 062413 ]. Here, we want to find whether there are other entangled states that can be shared entanglement arbitrarily many times. In this paper, we consider the problem of sharing quantum entanglement when the initial shared state is a two-qubit entangled Werner state. The goal is to maximize the number of Bobs that can share entanglement with a single Alice. By suitably choosing the entanglement witness operator and the unsharp measurement settings by the Bobs, we prove that there exist two-qubit entangled initial shared Werner states whose entanglement can be detected by arbitrarily many sequential observers Bobs with a single Alice. Then, we also consider the special case of the Werner state, that is, the maximally entangled state as the initial shared state. In this case, its entanglement can also be witnessed arbitrarily many times, and the number of Bobs increases with the decrease of parameter.
Nonlocality and quantum measurement are two fundamental topics in quantum theory and their interplay attracts intensive focuses since the discovery of Bell theorem. Recently, nonlocality sharing among multiple observers with one entangled pair has been predicted and experimentally observed by generalized quantum measurement---weak measurement. However, only the one-sided sequential case, i.e., one Alice and multiple Bobs, is widely discussed and little is known about the two-sided case. Here, we theoretically and experimentally explore the nonlocality sharing in the two-sided sequential measurements case in which one entangled pair is distributed to multiple Alices and Bobs. We experimentally observed double Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering among four observers in a photonic system. In the case that all observers adopt the same measurement strength of the weak measurement, it is observed that double EPR steering can be demonstrated simultaneously. The results not only deepen our understanding of relation between sequential measurements and nonlocality but also may find important applications in many quantum information tasks, such as randomness certification.
Abstract The recycling of quantum correlations has attracted widespread attention both theoretically and experimentally. Previous works show that bilateral sharing of nonlocality is impossible under mild measurement strategy and 2-qubit entangled state can be used to witness entanglement arbitrary many times by sequential and independent pairs of observers. However, less is known about the bilateral sharing of EPR steering yet. Here, we aim at investigating the EPR steering sharing between sequential pairs of observers. We show that an unbounded number of sequential Alice-Bob pairs can share the EPR steering as long as the initially shared state is an entangled two-qubit pure state. The claim is also true for particular class of mixed entangled states.
Phenomena that slip beyond the grasp of our classical intuition reveal uniquely quantum effects that deepen our understanding of the physical world and enable advances in information processing, particularly in quantum communication and computation. One such phenomenon is quantum steering, whereby measurements performed by one party influence the conditional states of another when the two share an entangled quantum system. If the observed correlations cannot be explained by a local hidden state model, the state is said to be steerable. In this work, we investigate the typicality of this behavior: given a generic two-qubit state and m Haar-random projective measurements, what is the probability of observing steering? We derive analytical expressions for the steering probability PS of Werner states in two- and three-setting scenarios, the latter restricted to coplanar projective measurements on the Bloch sphere. For larger numbers of settings and various random states ensembles, we perform numerical analyses showing that PS increases systematically with the number of measurements and substantially exceeds the corresponding probabilities associated with Bell nonlocality. Our results demonstrate that random states with minimal environmental coupling exhibit a high probability of steering for finite m and approach genuine typicality, PS=100%, as the number of settings increases. We provide a detailed characterization of PS across different state ensembles and specific families, including Bell-diagonal and Werner states, identifying those with the greatest non-classical potential and highlighting their relevance for protocols in which steering serves as a key resource.