Abstract In the noisy intermediate‐scale quantum (NISQ) era, multipartite entanglement in realistic noisy environments exhibits complex structures. Characterizing entanglement structures—particularly entanglement depth and intactness—has become increasingly essential for quantum information processing tasks. Traditional methods like standard entanglement witnesses assume that experimenters can exactly implement specific quantum measurements. Even minor inaccuracies in standard witness can introduce significant errors in entanglement detection. Certification methods are proposed with relaxed assumptions about the system and measurements for entanglement structures. First, entanglement states are classified with the same intactness into three distinct types based on their depth. Next, analytical witnesses are derived to detect the entanglement structure of general n‐qubit systems in both device‐independent and semi‐device‐independent scenarios, where some observables are untrusted while others remain reliable. Furthermore, this framework is extended to account for small measurement imperfections, ensuring robustness in practical settings. It is demonstrated that this witness can detect larger entanglement regions compared to previous Bell‐type inequalities. Remarkably, for Type I 4‐partite quantum states, this entanglement witness with measurement imperfections is identical to both device‐dependent and semi‐device‐independent approaches.
Abstract In the noisy intermediate‐scale quantum (NISQ) era, multipartite entanglement in realistic noisy environments exhibits complex structures. Characterizing entanglement structures—particularly entanglement depth and intactness—has become increasingly essential for quantum information processing tasks. Traditional methods like standard entanglement witnesses assume that experimenters can exactly implement specific quantum measurements. Even minor inaccuracies in standard witness can introduce significant errors in entanglement detection. Certification methods are proposed with relaxed assumptions about the system and measurements for entanglement structures. First, entanglement states are classified with the same intactness into three distinct types based on their depth. Next, analytical witnesses are derived to detect the entanglement structure of general n‐qubit systems in both device‐independent and semi‐device‐independent scenarios, where some observables are untrusted while others remain reliable. Furthermore, this framework is extended to account for small measurement imperfections, ensuring robustness in practical settings. It is demonstrated that this witness can detect larger entanglement regions compared to previous Bell‐type inequalities. Remarkably, for Type I 4‐partite quantum states, this entanglement witness with measurement imperfections is identical to both device‐dependent and semi‐device‐independent approaches.
Genuine multipartite entanglement represents the strongest type of entanglement, which is an essential resource for quantum information processing. Standard methods to detect genuine multipartite entanglement, e.g., entanglement witnesses, 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 an 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 independently. However, it is difficult to certify genuine entanglement of practical multipartite states in this way, and even more difficult to quantify it, due to the difficulty in identifying optimal multipartite Bell inequalities and protocols tolerant to state impurity. In this Letter, we explore a general and robust device-independent method that can be applied to various realistic multipartite quantum states in arbitrary finite dimension, while merely relying on bipartite Bell inequalities. Our method allows us both to certify the presence of genuine multipartite entanglement and to quantify it. Several important classes of entangled states are tested with this method, leading to the detection of genuinely entangled states. We also certify genuine multipartite entanglement in weakly entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, showing that the method applies equally well to less standard states.
Standard procedures for entanglement detection assume that experimenters can exactly implement specific quantum measurements. Here, we depart from such idealizations and investigate, in both theory and experiment, the detection of genuine multipartite entanglement when measurements are subject to small imperfections. For arbitrary qubits number n, we construct multipartite entanglement witnesses where the detrimental influence of the imperfection is independent of n. In a tabletop four-partite photonic experiment, we demonstrate first how a small amount of alignment error can undermine the conclusions drawn from standard entanglement witnesses and then perform the correction analysis. Furthermore, since we consider quantum devices that are trusted but not perfectly controlled, we showcase advantages in terms of noise resilience as compared to device-independent models.
Abstract The superposition of quantum states, quantified by coherence, is a fundamental feature to distinguish quantum mechanics from classical theories. Estimations of coherence with perfectly characterised devices have been well‐studied. However, imperfections or malfunctions of realistic measurement devices might nullify the characterization. Device‐independent (DI) tests allow to witness and quantify the quantum feature of a system, such as entanglement, without trusting the implementation devices. Although DI test is a powerful tool in many quantum information tasks, it generally requires nonlocal settings. Little is known if single party coherence can be witnessed and estimated via untrusted devices. In this work, coherence witnesses and estimations with untrusted devices are systematically studied. First, a no‐go theorem for detecting existences of single party coherence via a DI or semi DI means is proven. A general prepare‐and‐measure semi DI scheme for witnessing and estimating the amount of coherence is then proposed. How to estimate the relative entropy and the l 1 norm of single party coherence with analytical and numerical approaches is shown. As coherence is an essential resource for tasks such as quantum random number generation and quantum key distribution, it is expected that this result may shed light on designing new quantum cryptographic schemes.
Certifying high-dimensional quantum channels is essential for ensuring the reliability of quantum communication protocols. Existing certification schemes often rely on fully trusted internal devices, which is difficult to achieve in realistic scenarios. Here, we propose a semi-device-independent framework for certifying channel properties directly from observed statistics, assuming only that the system dimension is known. By explicitly incorporating the full set of structural constraints inherent to Choi states, our approach exploits the Choi-Jamiołkowski isomorphism for rigorous certification of quantum channels. The entanglement dimensionality of quantum channels is first certified by introducing a witness and numerically determining its Schmidt-number-dependent bounds. This certification method reproduces known analytical benchmarks and is applied to dephasing and depolarizing noise channels, thereby confirming its validity. To provide a more complete assessment of channel performance, the entanglement fidelity of quantum channels is also certified using a hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations based on localizing matrices. Lower bounds on the entanglement fidelity are obtained that are compatible with either the full set of observed statistics or a single witness value.
Violation of a Bell inequality certifies that the underlying state must be entangled in a device-independent way, although there exist some entangled states which do not violate such an inequality. However, for every entangled state, it is possible to find a Hermitian operator called an entanglement witness that can detect entanglement through some local measurements in a device-dependent method, but implementation of wrong measurements may lead to fake detection of entanglement. To avoid such difficulties, measurement-device-independent entanglement witness (MDI-EW) based on a semiquantum nonlocal game was proposed, which is not only robust against wrong measurements but also against a specific kind of lossy detectors. We employ here a measurement-device-independent entanglement witness to detect entanglement in a scenario where half of an entangled pair is possessed by a single observer while the other half is with multiple observers performing unsharp measurements, sequentially, independently, and preserving entanglement as much as possible. Interestingly, we find that the numbers of successful observers who can detect entanglement, measurement-device-independently, both with equal and unequal sharpness parameters of the noisy measurements, are greater than that obtained with standard and Bell-inequality-based entanglement detection methods, reflecting its robustness. The entanglement contents of the sequentially shared states are also analyzed. Unlike other scenarios, our investigations also reveal that in this measurement-device-independent situation, states having entanglement in proximity to maximal remain entangled until there are two sequential observers, even if they measure sharply.
Ensuring the correct functioning of quantum error correction (QEC) circuits is crucial to achieve fault tolerance in realistic quantum processors subjected to noise. The first checkpoint for a fully operational QEC circuit is to create genuine multipartite entanglement across all subsystems of physical qubits. We introduce a conditional witnessing technique to certify genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) that is efficient in the number of subsystems and, importantly, robust against experimental noise and imperfections. Specifically, we prove that the detection of entanglement in a linear number of bipartitions by a number of measurements that also scales linearly, suffices to certify GME. Moreover, our method goes beyond the standard procedure of separating the state from the convex hull of biseparable states, yielding an improved finesse and robustness compared to previous techniques. We apply our method to the noisy readout of stabilizer operators of the distance-three topological color code and its flag-based fault-tolerant version. In particular, we subject the circuits to combinations of three types of noise, namely, uniform depolarizing noise, two-qubit gate depolarizing noise, and bit-flip measurement noise. We numerically compare our method with the standard, yet generally inefficient, fidelity test and to a pair of efficient witnesses, verifying the increased robustness of our method. Last but not least, we provide the full translation of our analysis to a trapped-ion native gate set that makes it suitable for experimental applications.