Bell state measurements, of which the eigenvectors are in an entangled form, are crucial resources in the construction of quantum networks. Therefore, device-independent certification of a Bell state measurement has significance in the quantum information process because it satisfies the exact demand on security. In this study, we implement a proof-of-concept experiment to certify a Bell state measurement device independently in an entanglement swapping process, namely, self-testing. Instead of preparing a tensor product of two singlets with four photons, multiplex encoding in polarization and spatial modes is utilized to produce two pairs of entangled qubits. As a result, we implement a full Bell state measurement and achieve a high degree of Bell violation on the remaining two qubits, which are required for nontrivial self-testing of a Bell state measurement. Furthermore, our results combine the correlations before and after the swapping; thus, the quality of the performed Bell state measurement can be precisely inferred.
Bell state measurements, of which the eigenvectors are in an entangled form, are crucial resources in the construction of quantum networks. Therefore, device-independent certification of a Bell state measurement has significance in the quantum information process because it satisfies the exact demand on security. In this study, we implement a proof-of-concept experiment to certify a Bell state measurement device independently in an entanglement swapping process, namely, self-testing. Instead of preparing a tensor product of two singlets with four photons, multiplex encoding in polarization and spatial modes is utilized to produce two pairs of entangled qubits. As a result, we implement a full Bell state measurement and achieve a high degree of Bell violation on the remaining two qubits, which are required for nontrivial self-testing of a Bell state measurement. Furthermore, our results combine the correlations before and after the swapping; thus, the quality of the performed Bell state measurement can be precisely inferred.
Abstract Quantum entanglement is the key resource for quantum information processing. Device-independent certification of entangled states is a long standing open question, which arouses the concept of self-testing. The central aim of self-testing is to certify the state and measurements of quantum systems without any knowledge of their inner workings, even when the used devices cannot be trusted. Specifically, utilizing Bell’s theorem, one can infer the appearance of certain entangled state when the maximum violation is observed, e.g., to self-test singlet state using CHSH inequality. In this work, by constructing a versatile entanglement source, we experimentally demonstrate a generalized self-testing proposal for various bipartite entangled states up to four dimensions. We show that the high-quality generated states can approach the maximum violations of the utilized Bell inequalities, and thus, their Schmidt coefficients can be precisely inferred by self-testing them into respective target states with near-unity fidelities. Our results indicate the superior completeness and robustness of this method and promote self-testing as a practical tool for developing quantum techniques.
Quantum entanglement is the key resource for quantum information processing. Device-independent certification of entangled states is a long standing open question, which arouses the concept of self-testing. The central aim of self-testing is to certify the state and measurements of quantum systems without any knowledge of their inner workings, even when the used devices cannot be trusted. Specifically, utilizing Bell's theorem, it is possible to place a boundary on the singlet fidelity of entangled qubits. Here, beyond this rough estimation, we experimentally demonstrate a complete self-testing process for various pure bipartite entangled states up to four dimensions, by simply inspecting the correlations of the measurement outcomes. We show that this self-testing process can certify the exact form of entangled states with fidelities higher than 99.9% for all the investigated scenarios, which indicates the superior completeness and robustness of this method. Our work promotes self-testing as a practical tool for developing quantum techniques.
Graph states-one of the most representative families of multipartite entangled states-are important resources for multiparty quantum communication, quantum error correction, and quantum computation. Device-independent certification of highly entangled graph states plays a prominent role in quantum information processing tasks. Here we have experimentally demonstrated device-independent certification for multipartite graph states by adopting the robust self-testing scheme based on scalable Bell inequalities. Specifically, the prepared multi-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states and linear cluster states achieve a high degree of Bell violation, which are beyond the nontrivial bounds of the robust self-testing scheme. Furthermore, our work paves the way to the device-independent certification of complex multipartite quantum states.
Quantum entanglement, has been acknowledged as a precious resource due to its inherent nonclassical correlations between subsystems. These quantum correlations have the potential for many quantum processes, including canonical ones: quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, and dense coding. To exploit the advantages of quantum entanglement, two essential premises are required, i.e., to prepare high-quality entanglement and characterize quality level of prepared entanglement. Thus far, quantum entanglement can be produced in various quantum systems; however, it appears that this new resource is complex and difficult to characterize. The standard methods to characterize multipartite entanglement, e.g., entanglement witness, state tomography, or quantum state verification, require full knowledge of the Hilbert space dimension and precise calibration of measurement devices, which are usually difficult to acquire in experiment. The most radical way to overcome these problems is to detect entanglement solely based on the Bell-like correlations of measurement outcomes collected in the experiment, namely, device-independent characterization of entanglement. This article reviews the recently developed device-independent methods to characterize entanglement, including self-testing and device-independent certification of entanglement. These approaches can be widely applied in kinds of quantum information processing, especially for those with security demands.
Self-testing is a method with which a classical user can certify the state and measurements of quantum systems in a device-independent way. In particular, self-testing of entangled states is of great importance in quantum information processing. An understandable example is that the maximal violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality necessarily implies that the bipartite system shares a singlet. One essential question in self-testing is that, when one observes a nonmaximum violation, how far is the tested state from the target state (which maximally violates a certain Bell inequality)? The answer to this question describes the robustness of the used self-testing criterion, which is highly important in a practical sense. Recently, J. Kaniewski derived two analytic self-testing bounds for bipartite and tripartite systems. In this Letter, we experimentally investigate these two bounds with high-quality two-qubit and three-qubit entanglement sources. The results show that these bounds are valid for various entangled states that we prepared. Thereby, a proof-of-concept demonstration of robust self-testing is achieved, which improves on the previous results significantly.
Self-testing represents the strongest form of certification of a quantum system. Here, we theoretically and experimentally investigate self-testing of nonprojective quantum measurements. That is, how can one certify, from observed data only, that an uncharacterized measurement device implements a desired nonprojective positive-operator valued measure (POVM). We consider a prepare-and-measure scenario with a bound on the Hilbert space dimension and develop methods for (i) robustly self-testing extremal qubit POVMs and (ii) certifying that an uncharacterized qubit measurement is nonprojective. Our methods are robust to noise and thus applicable in practice, as we demonstrate in a photonic experiment. Specifically, we show that our experimental data imply that the implemented measurements are very close to certain ideal three- and four-outcome qubit POVMs and hence non-projective. In the latter case, the data certify a genuine four-outcome qubit POVM. Our results open interesting perspective for semi-device-independent certification of quantum devices.