Entanglement and contextuality are among the most intriguing and fundamental features of quantum mechanics. Entanglement concerns quantum states:it is a phenomenon that happens when a system can not be described by the knowledge of its subparts. Contextuality concerns quantum observables: it is the capacity they have to give rise to different experimental results depending on the observables with which they are measured. Both have received tremendous attention during the last decades, following the second quantum revolution, that saw the attitude towards quantum features switch from "why is that so?" to "how can we use this?".This thesis conceives protocols to detect and characterise entanglement and contextuality in specific setups, seeking to fill the gaps between the theoretical studies and the experimental implementations. Entanglement is studied in the case of optical hybrid variables, a recent approach that tries to join the advantages of the discrete and continuous variables encoding of information for quantum communication and computation protocols. In a first chapter, we study how the formalism of matrices of moments can be adapted to the hybrid case and apply it to several hybrid entangled states. We then explore various possible improvements and refinements using the theory of positive maps, in order to gain sensitivity with regard to our detection thresholds. In a second chapter, we focus on a specific setup, define an entanglement witness and explain how it can be implemented on available experiments. It is robust to noise currently observed in quantum optical setups and is based on measurements of genuinely hybrid observables. Contextuality is studied in a last part. A review is made of the theory, from its emergence through philosophical questions to the first mathematical proofs that quantum mechanics is contextual. The main structural theories that yield a global approach to this concept are presented. They are summoned to understand and discuss the loopholes that can affect experiments of contextuality. A protocol is given for a much-studied experiment, that of the Peres-Mermin square.
Entanglement and contextuality are among the most intriguing and fundamental features of quantum mechanics. Entanglement concerns quantum states:it is a phenomenon that happens when a system can not be described by the knowledge of its subparts. Contextuality concerns quantum observables: it is the capacity they have to give rise to different experimental results depending on the observables with which they are measured. Both have received tremendous attention during the last decades, following the second quantum revolution, that saw the attitude towards quantum features switch from "why is that so?" to "how can we use this?".This thesis conceives protocols to detect and characterise entanglement and contextuality in specific setups, seeking to fill the gaps between the theoretical studies and the experimental implementations. Entanglement is studied in the case of optical hybrid variables, a recent approach that tries to join the advantages of the discrete and continuous variables encoding of information for quantum communication and computation protocols. In a first chapter, we study how the formalism of matrices of moments can be adapted to the hybrid case and apply it to several hybrid entangled states. We then explore various possible improvements and refinements using the theory of positive maps, in order to gain sensitivity with regard to our detection thresholds. In a second chapter, we focus on a specific setup, define an entanglement witness and explain how it can be implemented on available experiments. It is robust to noise currently observed in quantum optical setups and is based on measurements of genuinely hybrid observables. Contextuality is studied in a last part. A review is made of the theory, from its emergence through philosophical questions to the first mathematical proofs that quantum mechanics is contextual. The main structural theories that yield a global approach to this concept are presented. They are summoned to understand and discuss the loopholes that can affect experiments of contextuality. A protocol is given for a much-studied experiment, that of the Peres-Mermin square.
A review is made of the field of contextuality in quantum mechanics. We study the historical emergence of the concept from philosophical and logical issues. We present and compare the main theoretical frameworks that have been derived. Finally, we focus on the complex task of establishing experimental tests of contextuality. Throughout this work, we try to show that the conceptualisation of contextuality has progressed through different complementary perspectives, before summoning them together to analyse the signification of contextuality experiments. Doing so, we argue that contextuality emerged as a discrete logical problem and developed into a quantifiable quantum resource.
Quantum information theory is a very young area of research offering a lot of challenging open questions to be tackled by ambitious upcoming physicists. One such problem is addressed in this thesis. Recently, several protocols have emerged which exploit both continuous variables and discrete variables. On the one hand, outperforming many of the established pure continuous variable or discrete variable schemes, these hybrid approaches offer new opportunities. However, on the other hand, they also lead to new, intricate, as yet uninvestigated, phenomena. An important ingredient of several of these hybrid protocols is a new kind of entanglement: The hybrid entanglement between continuous variable and discrete variable quantum systems, which is studied in detail in this work. An exhaustive analysis of this kind of entanglement is performed, where the focus is on bipartite entanglement. Nevertheless, also issues regarding multipartite hybrid entanglement are briefly discussed. The quintessence of this thesis is a new classification scheme which distinguishes between effective discrete variable hybrid entanglement and so-called true hybrid entanglement. However, along the way, also other questions are addressed, which have emerged during the studies. For example, entanglement witnessing is discussed not only for hybrid entangled states, but also for fully continuous variable two-mode Schroedinger cat states. Furthermore, subtleties regarding entanglement witnessing in a certain kind of mixed states are examined. Not only theoretical classification and analysis of hybrid entangled states are discussed, but also their generation is presented and a few applications are demonstrated.
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.
Quantum information can be processed in two fundamentally different ways, using either discrete or continuous variable implementations. Each one of them provides different practical advantages and drawbacks. In this thesis we study theoretical means allowing to implement quantum information protocols originally formulated for discrete quantum systems in physical objects characterized by continuous variables. At the heart of our considerations is the use of modular variables as helpful technique to reveal discrete structure in continuous-variable states, operations and observables. The present work is strongly guided by the experimental applicability of our ideas in quantum optics experiments, with a particular focus on the transverse degrees of freedom of single photons.One of the main themes of this thesis is the formulation of a framework for quantum information processing in phase-space based on the use of modular variables. The term modular variables refers to a specific class of observables that are periodic with respect to some pair of conjugate variables. In our framework we use these periodic observables in order to encode discrete quantum information in Hilbert spaces of infinite dimension. In particular, we consider protocols that involve measurements of judiciously chosen logical observables enabling the readout of the encoded discrete quantum information from the corresponding logical states. Using this framework we show how to perform tests of fundamental properties of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, Bell nonlocality and contextuality, in Hilbert spaces of various dimensions. Particularly, we generalize known tests of each of these properties, that were originally formulated for measurements with discrete outcomes, to more general measurement contexts comprising the case of bounded continuous outcomes. Concerning experimental implementations of the presented theoretical elaborations we discuss the transverse degrees of freedom of single photons as a natural platform to manipulate and measure modular variables. In particular, we demonstrate how to process discrete quantum information encoded in the spatial distribution of single photons via the optical Talbot effect - a near-field interference effect. Finally, we show how to produce d-dimensional entangled Talbot photon pairs without post-selection, using spontaneous parametric down-conversion and linear optical elements only. As last topic we explore the nonlocal properties of a specific class of hybrid entanglement between particle-like and wave-like optical qubits. Using a hybrid measurement scheme of Pauli and displaced parity measurements we show that, even after including realistic experimental losses, a violation of local-realism is theoretically possible.
Hybrid encoding of quantum information is a promising approach towards the realization of optical quantum protocols. It combines advantages of continuous variables encoding, such as high efficiencies, with those of discrete variables, such as high fidelities. In particular, entangled hybrid states were shown to be a valuable resource for quantum information protocols. In this work we present a hybrid entanglement witness that can be implemented on available experiments and is robust to noise currently observed in quantum optical setups. The proposed witness is based on measurements of genuinely hybrid observables. The noise model we consider is general. It is formally characterized with Kraus operators since the considered hybrid system can be expressed in a finite dimension basis. A practical advantage of the witness is that it can be tested by measuring just a few experimentally available observables.
The characterisation of quantum correlations, also known as entanglement, is central to quantum information theory. Operationally, entanglement gives rise to the notion of quantum non-locality, which challenges the ‘reality’ of quantum mechanics (adopting the terminology of Einstein, Podolski and Rosen) and arguably represents its most distinctive feature, in the sense that it calls for a departure from certain foundational tenets of classical physics. It should thus not come as a surprise that entanglement turns out to be a key resource for the implementation of a number of quantum communication protocols and also necessary to achieve computational speed-ups with quantum hardware, in the sense that accessing regions of the Hilbert space with entangled states allows one to shorten the computational depth of certain algorithms. Not surprisingly, generating and maintaining entanglement is generally difficult in practice, as it requires strong interactions between selected components of a system that must at the same time be isolated from the environment. Thanks to the techniques developed in quantum optical set-ups to achieve squeezed light, entanglement is, however, comparatively accessible with optical quantum continuous variables. As we shall see, in fact, continuous variable entanglement is closely related to the notion of squeezing. It is therefore of the utmost importance to be able to qualify and quantify the entanglement of quantum continuous variables, which is the subject matter of the present chapter. The first part of the chapter is devoted to techniques and criteria based on second moments to detect the entanglement of Gaussian states and also to the description of possible ways to quantify such quantum correlations, bearing in mind that the determination of entanglement monotones of clear operational significance is still an open problem, even in the restricted arena of Gaussian states. Although the criteria based on second moments are sufficient, but not necessary, for the detection of non-Gaussian entanglement too, we will push our analysis further by introducing more general criteria based on higher order statistical moments, which will be put to use to detect, on paper, the quantum correlations of an entangled cat-like state. We will also address the issues of entanglement distillation and quantum non-locality tests, in whose contexts we shall encounter other non-Gaussian operations and states, such as photon-subtracted states.