Indefinite causal order is an evolving field with potential involvement in quantum technologies. Here we propose and study one possible scenario of practical application in quantum communication: a compound entanglement distillation protocol that features two steps of a basic distillation protocol applied in a coherent superposition of two causal orders. This is achieved by using one faulty entangled pair to control-swap two others before a fourth pair is combined with the two swapped ones consecutively. As a result, the protocol distills the four faulty entangled states into one of a higher fidelity. Our protocol has a higher fidelity of distillation and probability of success for some input faulty pairs than conventional concatenations of the basic protocol that follow a definite distillation order. Our proposal shows the advantage of indefinite causal order in an application setting consistent with the requirements of quantum communication.
Indefinite causal order is an evolving field with potential involvement in quantum technologies. Here we propose and study one possible scenario of practical application in quantum communication: a compound entanglement distillation protocol that features two steps of a basic distillation protocol applied in a coherent superposition of two causal orders. This is achieved by using one faulty entangled pair to control-swap two others before a fourth pair is combined with the two swapped ones consecutively. As a result, the protocol distills the four faulty entangled states into one of a higher fidelity. Our protocol has a higher fidelity of distillation and probability of success for some input faulty pairs than conventional concatenations of the basic protocol that follow a definite distillation order. Our proposal shows the advantage of indefinite causal order in an application setting consistent with the requirements of quantum communication.
Quantum theory is in principle compatible with scenarios where physical processes occur in an indefinite order, potentially yielding advantages in a broad range of information processing tasks. However, advantages in communication, the most basic form of information processing, have so far remained controversial and hard to prove. Here we provide a framework for assessing the role of causal order in communication, by comparing different causal structures under the constraint that the allowed operations must not generate signaling from signaling-incapable devices. Using this framework, we establish a clear-cut advantage of indefinite causal order, and, at the same time, we identify a series of fundamental limits to the communication power of causal structures in quantum mechanics. Notably, we find that a special form of indefinite causal order, obtained by coherently controlling the order of two processes, enhances the transmission of classical messages in a one-shot scenario, but no quantum operation with indefinite order can offer advantages over shared entanglement when asymptotically many uses of the same communication device are employed. Overall, our results unveil non-trivial relations between communication, causal order, entanglement, and no-signaling quantum processes.
The quantum switch has been widely studied as a prototypical example of indefinite causal order in quantum information processing. However, the potential advantages of utilizing more general forms of indefinite causal orders remain largely unexplored. We study higher-order switches, which involve concatenated applications of the quantum switch, and we demonstrate that they provide a strict advantage over the conventional quantum switch in the task of quantum channel distillation. Specifically, we show that higher-order quantum switches enable the probabilistic distillation of any qubit Pauli channel into the identity channel with nonzero probability. This capability contrasts with the conventional quantum switch, which allows only a limited set of Pauli channels to be distilled with nonzero probability. We observe that, counterintuitively, the distillation rate generally increases the noisier the channel is. We fully characterize the asymptotic distillation rates of higher-order superswitches for qubit Pauli channels. Finally, we prove a no-go result for multiqubit generalizations.
In quantum Shannon theory, transmission of information is enhanced by quantum features. Up to very recently, the trajectories of transmission remained fully classical. Recently, a new paradigm was proposed by playing quantum tricks on two completely depolarizing quantum channels i.e., using coherent control in space or time of the two quantum channels. We extend here this control to the transmission of information through a network of an arbitrary number N of channels with arbitrary individual capacity i.e., information preservation characteristics in the case of indefinite causal order. We propose a formalism to assess information transmission in the most general case of N channels in an indefinite causal order scenario yielding the output of such transmission. Then, we explicitly derive the quantum switch output and the associated Holevo limit of the information transmission for N = 2 , N = 3 as a function of all involved parameters. We find in the case N = 3 that the transmission of information for three channels is twice that of transmission of the two-channel case when a full superposition of all possible causal orders is used.
In recent years, the investigation of causal relations in quantum theory has attracted a lot of interest. In particular, it has been found that it is possible to conceive of scenarios where some parties perform operations that are compatible with quantum theory locally, but that cannot be embedded into a global background causal structure. Such indefinite causal structures are of interest from a fundamental point of view, but also from the perspective of quantum information processing, since they do not fit into the usual paradigm of quantum circuits, which assumes a definite causal order. The main aim of this thesis is to study indefinite quantum causal relations involving more than two parties. Compared to the bipartite case, there are many new aspects and complications that arise in multipartite situations, which need to be clarified in order to fundamentally understand quantum causal structures, and to shed light on their implications and potential usefulness for quantum information processing.A suitable mathematical framework for the investigation of quantum causal relations is the process matrix formalism. In this framework, the notion of causal nonseparability was introduced in order to qualify scenarios that are incompatible with a definite causal order. In Chapter 2, we study how to generalise this concept to the multipartite case, how to characterise multipartite causally (non)separable quantum processes, and how to certify multipartite causal nonseparability. Another important topic is to determine which quantum scenarios with indefinite causal order are physically implementable, and how they can be realised concretely. In Chapter 3, we introduce two new classes of physically realisable multipartite quantum processes, and characterise them in terms of their process matrix descriptions. In particular, we define the class of quantum circuits with quantum control of causal order. The simplest example of such a circuit is the quantum switch, a protocol in which the order between two operations is controlled by a qubit in a superposition state, and which defines a causally nonseparable process. The class we introduce also contains more general examples of causally nonseparable processes with new features. We then show how the process matrix characterisation of this class allows us to search for new quantum information processing applications of causal nonseparability. In Chapter 4, we investigate a particular quantum communication effect in a scenario involving coherent control between two quantum channels. This leads us to a more general analysis of the notion of a coherently controlled channel, which involves certain subtilities. In Chapter 5, we turn to another problem that arises in multipartite scenarios, namely whether a given phenomenon is genuinely multipartite or not. More particularly, we study genuinely multipartite (non)causal correlations. In Chapter 6, we show that anomalous weak values are possible without post-selection. In Chapter 7, we show that certain tripartite process matrices, namely those that are unitarily extensible, have a realisation on so-called time-delocalised subsystems, i.e., quantum subsystems that are not associated with a definite time. The class of unitarily extensible tripartite process matrices is larger than the class of quantum circuits with quantum control, and in particular contains processes that violate so-called causal inequalities.
We present a practical entanglement distillation protocol (EDP) with linear optics for a genuine mixed state. Each components of the genuine mixed state is a pure less-entangled state. After successfully performing this EDP, we can obtain a high quality entangled mixed state. Our EDP can work for both ideal entanglement sources and current available spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) sources, which makes it feasible in current experimental technology. Moreover, by using the SPDC source, we can obtain a higher fidelity. This protocol can also be used to distill the multi-partite entangled systems. All the features make it practical and useful in current quantum communications.
High-fidelity entanglement shared between distant quantum systems is an essential resource for quantum communication and computation. Entanglement distillation addresses this need by converting multiple noisy Bell pairs into fewer higher-fidelity pairs, using only local quantum operations and classical communication. However, this approach typically requires a substantial overhead in the number of qubits. To bypass this hurdle, we propose to leverage the high-dimensional Hilbert space of a single pair of bosonic systems to store a large amount of entanglement, replacing the need for multi-qubit systems. To distill entanglement in such a setup, we devise a new entanglement distillation protocol, tailored for bosonic systems. The protocol converts a highly-entangled noisy state between two bosonic systems into a lower-dimensional but high-fidelity entangled state, using only local bosonic operations. We show that our protocol significantly enhances the fidelity of the entangled state in the presence of naturally occurring loss and dephasing errors. Compared to methods relying on multiple Bell pairs, our scheme offers a more hardware-efficient strategy, providing a practical route toward the realization of entanglement distillation.