This thesis is a dissemination of the work I have done in the last four years, under supervision of Prof. Tabish Qureshi. The central theme is towards the understanding of entanglement as a physical resource and looking for its possible applications. This thesis contains six chapters.The Chapter 1 provides the background knowledge for the thesis work, which includes the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics and the conceptual understanding of entanglement.The Chapter 2 unfolds the idea of fundamental concepts such as Bohr’s complementarity principle, quantum interference, which-path information, their trade-off relation, quantum eraser and also discuss how these issues play their role in building the foundations of quantum theory.The Chapter 3 is devoted to three slit interference experiments. The interference experiment is one of the most prominent concept of quantum theory. The two slit interference set-up is broadly studied and clearly understood, the synopsis for more than two slits are still not clear, recently a focussed research has been shifted towards three slit set-ups. We study the trade-off relation for three slit experiment in terms of visibility and the path distinguishability based on unambiguous quantum state discrimination (UQSD) method.The Chapter 4 discusses the wave-particle duality for multi-slit interference. Several attempts have been made in the past two decades to procure the trade-off relation for multi-slit experiments, yet a satisfactory answer was lacking. We obtain an analogous wave particle duality relation in terms of coherence and path-distinguishability based on UQSD. The role of coherence in building the interference pattern is largely admitted and their amount is readily stated by fringe visibility. Recently coherence has been understood as an information theoretical resource. We explore the measure of coherence as a wave quantifier rather than well known fringe visibility. We also analyze a recently proposed multi-path relation of Bagan et al. which claims to be in Englert’s form. We show that the proposed relation does not hold the essence of complementarity. We also derive a relation similar to Englert’s one to fill the exigency and to explicate its equivalence with our earlier proposed relation.The Chapter 5 discuss the scenario when the source is considered to be entangled. The entangled photon exhibits an interesting phenomenon known as ghost interference. The trade-off relation for two and three slit ghost experiment has been formulated, and also a doable quantum eraser has been proposed.The Chapter 6 aims to use the entanglement as a resource and develop the quantum information technologies, with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). We propose a QKD protocol using entangled qubits which is shown to add an additional security over the well known BB84 protocol.
This thesis is a dissemination of the work I have done in the last four years, under supervision of Prof. Tabish Qureshi. The central theme is towards the understanding of entanglement as a physical resource and looking for its possible applications. This thesis contains six chapters.The Chapter 1 provides the background knowledge for the thesis work, which includes the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics and the conceptual understanding of entanglement.The Chapter 2 unfolds the idea of fundamental concepts such as Bohr’s complementarity principle, quantum interference, which-path information, their trade-off relation, quantum eraser and also discuss how these issues play their role in building the foundations of quantum theory.The Chapter 3 is devoted to three slit interference experiments. The interference experiment is one of the most prominent concept of quantum theory. The two slit interference set-up is broadly studied and clearly understood, the synopsis for more than two slits are still not clear, recently a focussed research has been shifted towards three slit set-ups. We study the trade-off relation for three slit experiment in terms of visibility and the path distinguishability based on unambiguous quantum state discrimination (UQSD) method.The Chapter 4 discusses the wave-particle duality for multi-slit interference. Several attempts have been made in the past two decades to procure the trade-off relation for multi-slit experiments, yet a satisfactory answer was lacking. We obtain an analogous wave particle duality relation in terms of coherence and path-distinguishability based on UQSD. The role of coherence in building the interference pattern is largely admitted and their amount is readily stated by fringe visibility. Recently coherence has been understood as an information theoretical resource. We explore the measure of coherence as a wave quantifier rather than well known fringe visibility. We also analyze a recently proposed multi-path relation of Bagan et al. which claims to be in Englert’s form. We show that the proposed relation does not hold the essence of complementarity. We also derive a relation similar to Englert’s one to fill the exigency and to explicate its equivalence with our earlier proposed relation.The Chapter 5 discuss the scenario when the source is considered to be entangled. The entangled photon exhibits an interesting phenomenon known as ghost interference. The trade-off relation for two and three slit ghost experiment has been formulated, and also a doable quantum eraser has been proposed.The Chapter 6 aims to use the entanglement as a resource and develop the quantum information technologies, with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). We propose a QKD protocol using entangled qubits which is shown to add an additional security over the well known BB84 protocol.
Ninety years ago in 1927, at an international congress in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr gave an address which is recognized as the first instance in which the term "complementarity", as a physical concept, was spoken publicly [1], revealing Bohr's own thinking about Louis de Broglie's "duality". Bohr had very slowly accepted duality as a principle of physics: close observation of any quantum object will reveal either wave-like or particle-like behavior, one or the other of two fundamental and complementary features. Little disagreement exists today about complementarity's importance and broad applicability in quantum science. Book-length scholarly examinations even provide speculations about the relevance of complementarity in fields as different from physics as biology, psychology and social anthropology, connections which were apparently of interest to Bohr himself (see Jammer [2], Murdoch [3] and Whitaker [4]). Confusion evident in Como following his talk was not eliminated by Bohr's article [1], and complementarity has been subjected to nine decades of repeated examination ever since with no agreed resolution. Semi-popular treatments [5] as well as expert examinations [6-9] show that the topic cannot be avoided, and complementarity retains its central place in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, recent approaches by our group [10-13] and others [14-20] to the underlying notion of coherence now allow us to present a universal formulation of complementarity that may signal the end to the confusion. We demonstrate a new relationship that constrains the behavior of an electromagnetic field (quantum or classical) in the fundamental context of two-slit experiments. We show that entanglement is the ingredient needed to complete Bohr's formulation of complementarity, debated for decades because of its incompleteness.
We derive a generalized wave-particle duality relation for arbitrary multipath quantum interference phenomena. Beyond the conventional notion of the wave nature of a quantum system, i.e., the interference fringe visibility, we introduce a quantifier as the normalized quantum coherence, recently defined in the framework of quantum information theory. To witness the particle nature, we quantify the path distinguishability or the which-path information based on unambiguous quantum state discrimination. Then, the Bohr complementarity principle for multipath quantum interference can be stated as a duality relation between the quantum coherence and the path distinguishability. For two-path interference, the quantum coherence is identical to the interference fringe visibility, and the relation reduces to the well-known complementarity relation. The duality relation continues to hold in the case where mixedness is introduced due to possible decoherence effects.
Entanglement is the resource that most sharply distinguishes quantum information processing from its classical counterpart, and this thesis examines it from two complementary directions: how it can be detected and quantified, and how it, together with the broader machinery of quantum correlations, interference, and measurement, can be put to use. We first study two simple, measurable conditions that detect bipartite entanglement, and show that the extent to which either is violated yields a lower bound on the negativity of a state. The bound is established for two qubits, extended to systems of arbitrary finite dimension, and sharpened when partial knowledge of the Schmidt vectors is available. We then turn to discrete-outcome quantum sensor networks, in which one seeks only to determine which detectors, or which group or spatial pattern of detectors, has responded to a signal. Working in the weak-interaction regime, where the output states are nonorthogonal, we use minimum-error and unambiguous state discrimination to show that entangled initial states and collective measurements confer an advantage when detectors are grouped, and we develop a shift-operator formalism that gives closed-form success probabilities for the detection of shifted patterns in one- and two-dimensional arrays. Next we consider the problem of learning two unknown pure qubit states, together with their probabilities of occurrence, from a scrambled stream; we show that receiving the systems in identically prepared pairs supplies exactly the extra quantum information needed, since the resulting two-qubit state in the symmetric subspace has a unique decomposition into pure product states, which we recover by tomography. Finally, we show how interference and measurement can convert information encoded in the phases of quantum amplitudes into information encoded in their magnitudes, amplifying the amplitudes that carry useful information and suppressing those that do not, and we apply this technique to states produced by the quantum approximate optimization algorithm for the MaxCut and minimum-vertex-cover problems. Throughout, a single theme recurs: the correlations and superpositions permitted by quantum mechanics are at once something to be measured and something to be exploited.
The issue of interference and which-way information is addressed in the context of three-slit interference experiments. A new path distinguishability |DQ| is introduced, based on unambiguous quantum state discrimination. An inequality connecting the interference visibility and path distinguishability, |V+3−DQ2DQ≤1|, is derived which puts a bound on how much fringe visibility and which-way information can be simultaneously obtained. It is argued that this bound is tight. For two-slit interference, we derive a new duality relation which reduces to Englert's duality relation and the Greenberger–Yasin duality relation, in different limits.
Quantum entanglement is a non-classical correlation between quantum systems that cannot be accounted for by any local hidden-variable theory. Since its articulation in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper of 1935 and its formal testability through Bell's theorem in 1964, entanglement has evolved from a philosophical puzzle into the central resource of quantum information science. This review surveys the conceptual foundations of entanglement, the experimental record culminating in loophole-free Bell tests, and applications including quantum key distribution, quantum teleportation, and measurement-based quantum computation. We summarise quantitative results of representative Bell experiments, discuss entanglement measures for mixed states, and outline recent developments in long-distance entanglement distribution via satellites and quantum repeaters. Persistent challenges decoherence, certification of high-dimensional entanglement, and scalable distribution are identified as active frontiers of research.
Coherence and complementarity are two important themes in quantum mechanics, which have been widely and thoroughly investigated. Recently, with the rapid development of quantum information theory, various measures have been introduced for quantitatively studying the coherence and complementarity. However, most of these studies are independent of each other in that they focus on only one theme, for example, the wave-particle duality and Heisenberg uncertainty principle are usually regarded as manifestation of Bohr’s complementary principle, while coherence is a quantum feature closely related to quantum superposition. During the past few years, there has been a flurry of research interest in the study of quantum coherence from the quantum resource-theoretic point of view. In this paper, we establish two information conservation relations and employ them to characterize complementarity and quantum coherence. As an illustration of the main results, we discuss these two themes in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Our study reveals that these two quantum themes are closely related to each other. Our main results are listed as follows. Firstly, we establish two information conservation relations, one is based on " Bures distance versus fidelity” and the other based on " symmetry versus asymmetry”. Then we employ these information conservation relations to investigate coherence and complementarity. Specifically, we provide an explanation of the " Bures distance versus fidelity” trade-off relation from the information conservation perspective, establish the link between the information conservation relation and wave-particle duality, and derive the famous Englert inequality concerning " fringe visibility versus path distinguishability” from the information conservation relation. Furthermore, in the general framework of state-channel interaction, we derive " symmetry versus asymmetry” trade-off relation and explain it as an information conservation relation, reveal its intrinsic relations with coherence and complementarity. Lastly, we demonstrate that the two information conservation relations are closely interrelated, and we also discuss the coherence, decoherence and complementarity in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, explicitly, we reveal that the Bures distance can be regarded as a lower bound of the asymmetry of state-channel interaction while fidelity is an upper bound of the symmetry of state-channel interaction. We expect that our information conservation relation can provide a unified framework for the study of coherence and complementarity.