By generalizing to a mixed-state environment the treatment recently given to a model advanced by Cooper et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 1337 (1994)], we show that some characteristics of the so-called semiquantum chaos can be described by recourse to a special motion invariant of the problem, that thus becomes a chaos indicator.
Using the method of adiabatic invariants and the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we have calculated the ground-state wave function of a pair of coupled oscillators in so-called semiquantum chaos. Some interesting characteristics, e.g., the similarities and differences between the wave functions in the regular and chaotic states have been found. Time-correlation functions of the wave functions and their Fourier spectra in two states have also been investigated. The sensitivity of the wave function in the chaotic state to the initial conditions has been identified.
Quantum cryptography has attracted much attention in recent years. In most existing quantum cryptographic protocols, players usually need the full quantum power of generating, manipulating or measuring quantum states. Semiquantum cryptography was proposed to deal with the issue that some players require only partial quantum power, such as preparing or measuring quantum states in the classical basis, which simplifies the implementations of quantum cryptography. However, the efficiency of the existing semiquantum cryptographic protocols was relatively low from a practical point of view. In this paper, we devise some new semiquantum key distribution (SQKD) protocols which highly improve the efficiency of the most well-known SQKD protocols [Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 140501 (2007) & Phys. Rev. A 79, 052312 (2009)]. By letting players select their actions asymmetrically, the efficiency of our new protocols can be made asymptotically close to 100%. Besides, one of our proposed protocols also utilizes the discarded X-SIFT bits in the original SQKD protocol, which further improves the efficiency of SQKD. We prove that the proposed SQKD protocols are completely robust against the most general attack.
We quantitatively investigate the non-classicality and non-locality of a whole new class of mixed disparate quantum and semiquantum photon sources at the quantum-classical boundary. The latter include photon added thermal and photon added coherent sources, experimentally investigated recently by Zavatta et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 140406 (2009)]. The key quantity in our investigations is the visibility of the corresponding photon-photon correlation function. We present explicit results on the violations of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality - which is a measure of nonclassicality - as well as of Bell-type inequalities.