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Light Science & Applications

Measurement-device-independent continuous variable entanglement witness in a quantum network

Jing Wen Fu, Xutong Wang, Shengshuai Liu, Jietai Jing

Published Nov 3, 2025• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The reliable detection of entanglement plays a crucial role in the construction of quantum networks. The conventional entanglement witness (EW) method has high requirements for measurement device and relies on reliable implementation of the measurement. With unreliable measurement device, EW process can be easily attacked by eavesdroppers, which can lead to incorrect entanglement detection results. Therefore, a feasible and secure measurement device independent entanglement witness (MDIEW) method is desired for constructing quantum networks. Here, we detect the continuous variable entanglement by a MDIEW in a quantum network. It is demonstrated that the conventional EW method can be affected when the local oscillator intensity is changed, while the MDIEW method can detect entanglement between users without being affected. Our results provide a trustworthy method to detect entanglement, which is an important step for constructing secure quantum networks.

DOI
10.1038/s41377-025-02039-x

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The reliable detection of entanglement plays a crucial role in the construction of quantum networks. The conventional entanglement witness (EW) method has high requirements for measurement device and relies on reliable implementation of the measurement. With unreliable measurement device, EW process can be easily attacked by eavesdroppers, which can lead to incorrect entanglement detection results. Therefore, a feasible and secure measurement device independent entanglement witness (MDIEW) method is desired for constructing quantum networks. Here, we detect the continuous variable entanglement by a MDIEW in a quantum network. It is demonstrated that the conventional EW method can be affected when the local oscillator intensity is changed, while the MDIEW method can detect entanglement between users without being affected. Our results provide a trustworthy method to detect entanglement, which is an important step for constructing secure quantum networks.
Entanglement witness is of great importance in characterizing quantum systems. The imperfections in conventional entanglement witness schemes could lead to the misidentification of a separated state as an entangled state. Measurement-device-independent entanglement witness (MDIEW) has been proposed and demonstrated to resolve the imperfect measurement devices. So far, however, the MDIEW has been restricted to a two-party qubit entangled state. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate MDIEW for multipartite entangled states. We experimentally detect the genuine entanglement and the entanglement structure of a tripartite entangled state based on an eight-photon interferometry. Furthermore, with the verified multipartite entangled state, we demonstrate quantum randomness generation and open-destination quantum key distribution in an measurement-device-independent manner. Our research presents an important step toward building a robust and secure quantum network.
Quantum entanglement serves as an essential resource for quantum information technology. In many realistic quantum information tasks, it is necessary to reliably verify entanglement even when the measurement devices are unreliable. In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate measurement-device-independent verification of continuous-variable (CV) entanglement. We show that the conventional CV entanglement witness may falsely identify a separable state as a CV entangled state when the measurement devices are unreliable. To eliminate such need for trusted measurement devices, we implement a measurement-device-independent entanglement witness for verifying CV entanglement and demonstrate its resilience against local oscillator power and phase modifications. Our Letter sheds light on advancing high-security quantum information processing and its practical implementation in quantum networks.
We experimentally demonstrated a protocol for measurement device independent entanglement witness (MDI-EW) presented in [1]. A measurement device independent (MDI) protocol will allow two parties (Alice and Bob) to verify that they share an entangled state via the help of trusted input states without making any assumption on the measurement device using only the statistics of the output of the measurement device. Verification of entanglement between states is important as entangled states are a commonly used resource in several aspects of quantum information science such as quantum key distribution. Experimental implementation of MDI-EW in discrete variables have previously been demonstrated in [2], [3].
Entanglement, the essential resource in quantum information processing, should be witnessed in many tasks such as quantum computing and quantum communication. The conventional entanglement witness method, relying on an idealized implementation of measurements, could wrongly conclude a separable state to be entangled due to imperfect detections. Inspired by the idea of a time-shift attack, we construct an attack on the conventional entanglement witness process and demonstrate that a separable state can be falsely identified to be entangled. To close such detection loopholes, based on a recently proposed measurement-device-independent entanglement witness method, we design and experimentally demonstrate a measurement-device-independent entanglement witness for a variety of two-qubit states. By the new scheme, we show that an entanglement witness can be realized without detection loopholes.
Entanglement, a critical resource for quantum information processing, needs to be witnessed in many practical scenarios. Theoretically, witnessing entanglement is by measuring a special Hermitian observable, called an entanglement witness (EW), which has non-negative expected outcomes for all separable states but can have negative expectations for certain entangled states. In practice, an EW implementation may suffer from two problems. The first one is reliability. Due to unreliable realization devices, a separable state could be falsely identified as an entangled one. The second problem relates to robustness. A witness may not be optimal for a target state and fail to identify its entanglement. To overcome the reliability problem, we employ a recently proposed measurement-device-independent entanglement witness scheme, in which the correctness of the conclusion is independent of the implemented measurement devices. In order to overcome the robustness problem, we optimize the EW to draw a better conclusion given certain experimental data. With the proposed EW scheme, where only data postprocessing needs to be modified compared to the original measurement-device-independent scheme, one can efficiently take advantage of the measurement results to maximally draw reliable conclusions.
The robust estimation of entanglement is key to the validation of implementations of quantum systems. On the one hand, the evaluation of standard entanglement measures, either using quantum tomography or using quantitative entanglement witnesses, requires perfect implementation of measurements. On the other hand, measurement-device-independent entanglement witnesses (MDIEWs) can certify entanglement of all entangled states using untrusted measurement devices. We show that MDIEWs can be used as well to quantify entanglement according to standard entanglement measures, and we present a practical method to derive such witnesses using experimental data only.