Abstract Quantum coherence is one of the most basic characteristics of quantum mechanics. Here we give some methods to detect and measure quantum coherence. Firstly, we propose a coherence criterion without full quantum state tomography based on partial transposition. Moreover, we present a coherent nonlinear detection strategy from witnesses, in which we find that for some coherent states, normal witness detection fails but our nonlinear detection succeeds. In addition, we prove that when the nonlinear detection on the two copies of the coherent state fails, the nonlinear detection on the three copies may be successful. Finally, due to the difficulty in calculating robustness of coherence for general states, we introduce a lower bound for coherent robustness based on the witness operator, and after comparing our lower bound with the currently known lower bound, one show that our lower bound is better. Coherence is believed to play a crucial role in quantum information tasks, making the detection and quantization of coherence particularly significant. Therefore, these results help to open up new avenues for advancement in quantum theory.
Abstract Quantum coherence is one of the most basic characteristics of quantum mechanics. Here we give some methods to detect and measure quantum coherence. Firstly, we propose a coherence criterion without full quantum state tomography based on partial transposition. Moreover, we present a coherent nonlinear detection strategy from witnesses, in which we find that for some coherent states, normal witness detection fails but our nonlinear detection succeeds. In addition, we prove that when the nonlinear detection on the two copies of the coherent state fails, the nonlinear detection on the three copies may be successful. Finally, due to the difficulty in calculating robustness of coherence for general states, we introduce a lower bound for coherent robustness based on the witness operator, and after comparing our lower bound with the currently known lower bound, one show that our lower bound is better. Coherence is believed to play a crucial role in quantum information tasks, making the detection and quantization of coherence particularly significant. Therefore, these results help to open up new avenues for advancement in quantum theory.
Quantum coherence is the most distinguished feature of quantum mechanics. It lies at the heart of the quantum-information technologies as the fundamental resource and is also related to other quantum resources, including entanglement. It plays a critical role in various fields, even in biology. Nevertheless, the rigorous and systematic resource-theoretic framework of coherence has just been developed recently, and several coherence measures are proposed. Experimentally, the usual method to measure coherence is to perform state tomography and use mathematical expressions. Here, we alternatively develop a method to measure coherence directly using its most essential behavior-the interference fringes. The ancilla states are mixed into the target state with various ratios, and the minimal ratio that makes the interference fringes of the "mixed state" vanish is taken as the quantity of coherence. We also use the witness observable to witness coherence, and the optimal witness constitutes another direct method to measure coherence. For comparison, we perform tomography and calculate l_{1} norm of coherence, which coincides with the results of the other two methods in our situation. Our methods are explicit and robust, providing a nice alternative to the tomographic technique.
The detection and characterization of quantum coherence is of fundamental importance both in the foundations of quantum theory as well as for the rapidly developing field of quantum technologies, where coherence has been linked to quantum advantage. Typical approaches for detecting coherence employ {\it coherence witnesses} -- observable quantities whose expectation value can be used to certify the presence of coherence. By design, coherence witnesses are only able to detect coherence for some, but not all, possible states of a quantum system. In this work we construct protocols capable of detecting the presence of coherence in an {\it unknown} pure quantum state ∣ψ⟩. Having access to m copies of an unknown pure state ∣ψ⟩ we show that the sample complexity of any experimental procedure for detecting coherence with constant probability of success ≥2/3 is Θ(c(∣ψ⟩)−1), where c(∣ψ⟩) is the geometric measure of coherence of ∣ψ⟩. However, assuming access to the unitary Uψ which prepares the unknown state ∣ψ⟩, and its inverse Uψ†, we devise a coherence detecting protocol that employs amplitude-amplification {\it a la} Grover, and uses a quadratically smaller number O(c(∣ψ⟩)−1/2) of samples. Furthermore, by augmenting amplitude amplification with phase estimation we obtain an experimental estimation of upper bounds on the geometric measure of coherence within additive error ε with a sample complexity that scales as O(1/ε) as compared to the O(1/ε2) sample complexity of Monte Carlo estimation methods. The average number of samples needed in our amplitude estimation protocol provides a new operational interpretation for the geometric measure of coherence. Finally, we also derive bounds on the amount of noise our protocols are able to tolerate.
Quantum coherence has wide-ranging applications from quantum thermodynamics to quantum metrology, quantum channel discrimination, and even quantum biology. Thus, detecting and quantifying coherence are two fundamental problems in quantum resource theory. Here, we introduce feasible methods to detect and estimate the coherence by constructing coherence witnesses for any finite-dimensional states. Our coherence witnesses detect coherent states by testing whether the expectation value of the witness is negative or not. Two typical coherence witnesses are proposed and discussed based on our witness-constructing method, which are also used to estimate the robustness of coherence, the l1 norm, and the l2 norm of coherence measures. Furthermore, we compare one of our coherence witnesses with a previously introduced witness by proving that our witness is strictly stronger than that previous witness. We also present an application of coherence in a quantum metrology task, in which we estimate an unknown parameter by measuring our coherence witness.
Quantum states may exhibit asymmetry with respect to the action of a given group. Such an asymmetry of states can be considered as a resource in applications such as quantum metrology, and it is a concept that encompasses quantum coherence as a special case. We introduce explicitly and study the robustness of asymmetry, a quantifier of asymmetry of states that we prove to have many attractive properties, including efficient numerical computability via semidefinite programming, and an operational interpretation in a channel discrimination context. We also introduce the notion of asymmetry witnesses, whose measurement in a laboratory detects the presence of asymmetry. We prove that properly constrained asymmetry witnesses provide lower bounds to the robustness of asymmetry, which is shown to be a directly measurable quantity itself. We then focus our attention on coherence witnesses and the robustness of coherence, for which we prove a number of additional results; these include an analysis of its specific relevance in phase discrimination and quantum metrology, an analytical calculation of its value for a relevant class of quantum states, and tight bounds that relate it to another previously defined coherence monotone.
We present a nonlinear entanglement detection strategy that detects entanglement that the linear detection strategy fails. We show that when the nonlinear entanglement detection strategy fails to detect the entanglement of an entangled state with two copies, it may succeed with three or more copies. Based on our strategy, a witness combined with a suitable quantum mechanical observable may detect the entanglement that cannot be detected by the witness alone. Moreover, our strategy can also be applied to detect multipartite entanglement by using the witnesses for bipartite systems, as well as to entanglement concentrations.
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.