Entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) formulates the restriction of the inherent uncertainty of quantum mechanics from an information-theoretic perspective. A tighter lower bound for uncertainty relations can provide information-theoretic security to quantum communication protocols. Recently, a generalized EUR (GEUR) for the measurement of multiple observables in arbitrary many-body systems has been formulated. Here, we experimentally test this GEUR using a four-photon entangled state with a controllable decoherence channel and show that for the tripartite scenario, the GEUR improves the entropic bound from Renes and Boileau's famous results. As an application, we further demonstrate an improvement of the secure key rate in quantum key distribution from the GEUR. Our results extend the test of EURs into multipartite regimes and may find applications in practical quantum cryptography tasks.
Entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) formulates the restriction of the inherent uncertainty of quantum mechanics from an information-theoretic perspective. A tighter lower bound for uncertainty relations can provide information-theoretic security to quantum communication protocols. Recently, a generalized EUR (GEUR) for the measurement of multiple observables in arbitrary many-body systems has been formulated. Here, we experimentally test this GEUR using a four-photon entangled state with a controllable decoherence channel and show that for the tripartite scenario, the GEUR improves the entropic bound from Renes and Boileau's famous results. As an application, we further demonstrate an improvement of the secure key rate in quantum key distribution from the GEUR. Our results extend the test of EURs into multipartite regimes and may find applications in practical quantum cryptography tasks.
Abstract Entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) plays a vital role in quantum information theories by demonstrating the intrinsic uncertainty of nature from the information-theoretic perspective. A tighter lower bound for uncertainty relations facilitates more accurate predictions of measurement outcomes and more robust quantum information processing. However, meaningful EURs in multipartite scenarios are yet to be identified. In this study, we derived a generalized EUR (GEUR) for the measurement of multiple observables in arbitrary many-body systems. The corresponding GEUR bound is shown to be tighter than Renes--Boileau \textit{et al.}'s bound when applied in a tripartite scenario. We experimentally tested the GEUR with a four-photon entangled state in an optical platform. We demonstrated that GEUR provides a tighter lower bound of the quantum-secret-key rate, which can readily accelerate practical quantum key distribution protocols. By providing a close peek at the nature of uncertainty, our results may find broad applications in the security analysis of quantum cryptography.
The uncertainty principle, which demonstrates the intrinsic uncertainty of nature from an information-theory perspective, is at the heart of quantum information theory. In the realm of quantum information theory, Shannon entropy is used to depict the uncertainty relation in general. A tighter lower bound for uncertainty relations facilitates more accurate predictions of measurement outcomes and more robust quantum information processing. Interestingly, the tripartite entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) can be further optimized. Renes et al. proposed a tripartite EUR [J. M. Renes and J.-C. Boileau, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 020402 (2009)], and subsequently, Ming et al. strengthened its lower bound in [F. Ming, D. Wang, X.-G. Fan, W.-N. Shi, L. Ye, and J.-L. Chen, Phys. Rev. A 102, 012206 (2020)]. Specifically, we derive a tighter lower bound of the tripartite EUR using the Holevo quantity. Furthermore, we generalize the tripartite EUR, that is, the generalized entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurements in multipartite systems. As illustrations, we provide several typical examples to show that our bound is tight and outperforms the previous bound. Furthermore, our findings pave the way for using the tighter bound for the quantum secret key rate in quantum key distribution protocols and are essential for quantum precision measurements in the framework of genuine multipartite systems. By providing a close peek at the nature of uncertainty, our results may find broad applications in the security analysis of quantum cryptography.
Abstract The uncertainty relation is regarded as a remarkable feature of quantum mechanics differing from the classical counterpart, and it plays a backbone role in the region of quantum information theory. In principle, the uncertainty relation offers a nontrivial limit to predict the outcome of arbitrarily incompatible observed variables. Therefore, to pursue a more general uncertainty relations ought to be considerably important for obtaining accurate predictions of multi-observable measurement results in genuine multipartite systems. In this article, we derive a generalized entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) for multi-measurement in a multipartite framework. It is proved that the bound we proposed is stronger than the one derived from Renes et al. in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103,020402(2009) ] for the arbitrary multipartite case. As an illustration, we take several typical scenarios that confirm that our proposed bound outperforms that presented by Renes et al. Hence, we believe our findings provide generalized uncertainty relations with regard to multi-measurement setting, and facilitate the EUR’s applications on quantum precision measurement regarding genuine multipartite systems.
Recently, an entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurements was proposed by Liu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 91, 042133 (2015)]. However, the lower bound of the relation is not always tight with respect to different measurements. Herein, we improve the lower bound of the entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurements, referred to as a simply constructed bound (SCB). We verify that the SCB is tighter than Liu et al.'s result for arbitrary mutually unbiased basis measurements, which might play a fundamental and crucial role in practical quantum information processing. Moreover, we optimize the SCB by considering mutual information and the Holevo quantity, and propose an optimized SCB. Notably, the proposed bounds are extrapolations of the behavior of two measurements to a larger collection of measurements. It is believed that our findings would shed light on entropy-based uncertainty relations in the multiple measurement scenario and will be beneficial for security analysis in quantum key distributions.
Entropic uncertainty relations demonstrate the intrinsic uncertainty of nature from an information-theory perspective. Recently, a quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurements was proposed by Wu et al. [Phys. Rev. A 106, 062219 (2022)]. Interestingly, the quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurement settings can be further generalized. In this work, we propose two complementary multipartite quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relations and our lower bounds depend on values of complementarity of the observables, (conditional) von Neumann entropies, Holevo quantities, and mutual information. As an illustration, we provide several typical cases to exhibit that our bounds are tighter and outperform the previous bounds.
We present the generalized state-dependent entropic uncertainty relations in a multiple measurements setting and the optimal lower bound is obtained by considering different measurement sequences. We then apply this uncertainty relation to witness entanglement and give the experimentally accessible lower bounds on both bipartite and tripartite entanglements. This method of detecting entanglement is applied to a physical system of two particles on a one-dimensional lattice and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ)-Werner state. It is shown that, for measurements that are not in mutually unbiased bases, this generalized entropic uncertainty relation is superior to the previous state-independent one in entanglement detection. Furthermore, we conduct a demonstration of multipartite entanglement detection of GHZ states up to ten qubits on the Quafu cloud quantum computation platform. Our results might play important roles in detecting multipartite entanglement experimentally.