Understanding the characteristics of a quantum systems when affected by noise is one of the biggest challenges for quantum technologies. The general Pauli error channel is an important lossless channel for quantum communication. In this work we consider the effects of a Pauli channel on a pure four-qubit state and simulate the Pauli channel experimentally by studying the action on polarization encoded entangled photons. When the noise channel acting on the photons is correlated, a set spanned by four orthogonal bound entangled states can be generated. We study this interesting case experimentally and demonstrate that products of Bell states can be brought into a bound entangled regime. We find states in the set of bound entangled states which experimentally violate the CHSH inequality while still possessing a positive partial transpose.
Understanding the characteristics of a quantum systems when affected by noise is one of the biggest challenges for quantum technologies. The general Pauli error channel is an important lossless channel for quantum communication. In this work we consider the effects of a Pauli channel on a pure four-qubit state and simulate the Pauli channel experimentally by studying the action on polarization encoded entangled photons. When the noise channel acting on the photons is correlated, a set spanned by four orthogonal bound entangled states can be generated. We study this interesting case experimentally and demonstrate that products of Bell states can be brought into a bound entangled regime. We find states in the set of bound entangled states which experimentally violate the CHSH inequality while still possessing a positive partial transpose.
Due to the important role of quantum information technology in the future development of science and technology, researchers have extensively studied the preparation, characterization, and application of quantum systems. It is of great significance to further study the universality and generalization of multi-qubit entangled states. Especially in quantum communication, the actual quantum system is always affected by various noises from the environment. Noise has a significant impact on the properties of the actual quantum system, so we study the effects of noise on a prepared two-photon four-qubit state by two methods. We experimentally simulated the most common bit-flip noise in quantum systems. The law of evolution of the fidelity of two-dimensional four-qubit states and violation of the Mermin inequality and the Ardehali inequality for LR under different levels of bit-flip noise are investigated. The experimental results show that entanglement fidelity and nonlocality can be used to judge the degree of noise interference in the quantum channel and, thus, judge the security of the quantum communication channel. This judgment is of great significance for the realization of practical long-distance multi-node quantum communication.
Quantum mechanics is undoubtedly a weird field of science, which violates many deep conceptual tenets of classical physics, requiring reconsideration of the concepts on which classical physics is based. For instance, it permits persistent correlations between classically separated systems, that are termed as entanglement. To circumvent these problems and explain entanglement, hidden variables theories--based on undiscovered parameters--have been devised. However, John S. Bell and others invented inequalities that can distinguish between the predictions of local hidden variable (LHV) theories and quantum mechanics. The CHSH-inequality (formulated by J. Clauser, M. Horne, A. Shimony and R. A. Holt), is one of the most famous among these inequalities. In the present work, we found that this inequality actually contains an even simpler logical structure, which can itself be described by an inequality and will be violated by quantum mechanics. We found 3 simpler inequalities and were able to violate them experimentally. Furthermore, the CHSH inequality can be used to devise games that can outperform classical strategies. We explore CHSH-games for biased and unbiased cases and present their experimental realizations. We also found a remarkable application of CHSH-games in real life, namely in the card game of duplicate Bridge. In this thesis, we have described this application along with its experimental realization. Moreover, non-local games with quantum inputs can be used to certify entanglement in a measurement device independent manner. We implemented this method and detected entanglement in a set of two-photon Werner states. Our results are in good agreement with theory. A peculiar form of entanglement that is not distillable through local operations and classical communication (LOCC) is known as bound entanglement (BE). In the present work, we produced and studied BE in four-partite Smolin states and present an experimental violation of a Bell inequality by such states. Moreover we produced a three-qubit BE state, which is also the first experimental realization of a tripartite BE state. We also present its activation, where we experimentally demonstrate super additivity of quantum information resources.
We begin this thesis by expanding the technique of teleportation simulation, which adds noise to the entangled resource state to mimic channel effects. By introducing classical noise in the communication step, we show it is possible to simulate more than just Pauli channels using teleportation. This new class is characterised, and studied in detail for a particular resource state, leading to a family of simulable channels named "Pauli-Damping channels" whose properties are analysed. Also introduced are a new family of quantum states, "phase Werner" states, whose entanglement properties relate to the interesting conjecture of bound entangled states with a negative partial transpose. Holevo-Werner channels, to which these states are connected, are shown to be teleportation covariant. We exploit this to present several interesting results, including the optimal estimation of the channel-defining parameter. The minimal binary-discrimination error for Holevo-Werner channels is bounded for the first time with the analytical form of the quantum Chernoff bound. We also consider the secret key capacity of these channels, showing how different entanglement measures provide a better upper bound for different regions of these channels. Finally, a method for generating new Bell inequalities is presented, exploiting nonphysical probability distributions to obtain new inequalities. Tens of thousands of new inequivalent inequalities are generated, and their usefulness in closing the detection loophole for imperfect detectors is examined, with comparison to the current optimal construction. Two candidate Bell inequalities which may equal or beat the best construction are presented.
The rapidly developing interdisciplinary field of quantum information, which merges quantum and information science, studies non-classical aspects of quantum systems. These studies are motivated by the promise that the non-classicality can be used to solve tasks more efficiently than classical methods would allow. In many quantum informational studies, non-classical behaviour is attributed to the notion of entanglement. In this thesis we use photons to experimentally investigate fundamental questions such as: What happens to the entanglement in a system when it is affected by noise? In our study of noisy entanglement we pursue the challenging task of creating bound entanglement. Bound entangled states are created through an irreversible process that requires entanglement. Once in the bound regime, entanglement cannot be distilled out through local operations assisted by classical communication. We show that it is possible to experimentally produce four-photon bound entangled states and that a violation of a Bell inequality can be achieved. Moreover, we demonstrate an entanglement-unlocking protocol by relaxing the condition of local operations. We also explore the non-classical nature of quantum mechanics in several single-photon experiments. In these experiments, we show the violation of various inequalities that were derived under the assumption of non-contextuality. Using qutrits we construct and demonstrate the simplest possible test that offers a discrepancy between classical and quantum theory. Furthermore, we perform an experiment in the spirit of the Kochen-Specker theorem to illustrate the state-independence of this theorem. Here, we investigate whether or not measurement outcomes exhibit fully contextual correlations. That is, no part of the correlations can be attributed to the non-contextual theory. Our results show that only a small part of the experimental generated correlations are amenable to a non-contextual interpretation.
The discovery of super dense coding paved the way for future quantum communications that exploit the power of entanglement. The protocol lets users communicate two classical bits using a pre-shared entangled pair of qubits called a Bell pair. However, the protocol assumes that a noiseless channel exists between end users. Moreover, perfect Bell pairs may not always be created in any experimental set up. We study the single shot communication properties of partially entangled Werner state and partially entangled pure bipartite states by considering the two-Pauli channel. The two-Pauli channel accommodates for both bit flips and phase flips that qubits may suffer during transmission. Quantification of entanglement is done via entanglement of formation and its dependence on capacity is analyzed.
Quantum entanglement is a crucial resource for learning properties from nature, but a precise characterization of its advantage can be challenging. In this Letter, we consider learning algorithms without entanglement to be those that only utilize states, measurements, and operations that are separable between the main system of interest and an ancillary system. Interestingly, we show that these algorithms are equivalent to those that apply quantum circuits on the main system interleaved with mid-circuit measurements and classical feedforward. Within this setting, we prove a tight lower bound for Pauli channel learning without entanglement that closes the gap between the best-known upper and lower bound. In particular, we show that Θ(2^{n}ϵ^{-2}) rounds of measurements are required to estimate each eigenvalue of an n-qubit Pauli channel to ϵ error with high probability when learning without entanglement. In contrast, a learning algorithm with entanglement only needs Θ(ϵ^{-2}) copies of the Pauli channel. The tight lower bound strengthens the foundation for an experimental demonstration of entanglement-enhanced advantages for Pauli noise characterization.