The restrictions that nature places on the distribution of correlations in a multipartite quantum system play fundamental roles in the evolution of such systems, and yield vital insights into the design of protocols for the quantum control of ensembles with potential applications in the field of quantum computing. We show how this entanglement sharing behavior may be studied in increasingly complex systems of both theoretical and experimental significance and demonstrate that entanglement sharing, as well as other unique features of entanglement, e.g. the fact that maximal information about a multipartite quantum system does not necessarily entail maximal information about its component subsystems, may be understood as specific consequences of the phenomenon of complementarity extended to composite quantum systems. We also present a local hidden-variable model supplemented by an efficient amount of classical communication that reproduces the quantum-mechanical predictions for the entire class of Gottesman-Knill circuits. The success of our simulation provides strong evidence that the power of quantum computation arises not directly from entanglement, but rather from the nonexistence of an efficient, local realistic description of the computation, even when augmented by an efficient amount of nonlocal, but classical communication. Finally, we note that the findings presented in this thesis support the conjecture that Hilbert space dimension is an objective property of a quantum system since it constrains the number of valid conceptual divisions of the system into subsystems.
The restrictions that nature places on the distribution of correlations in a multipartite quantum system play fundamental roles in the evolution of such systems, and yield vital insights into the design of protocols for the quantum control of ensembles with potential applications in the field of quantum computing. We show how this entanglement sharing behavior may be studied in increasingly complex systems of both theoretical and experimental significance and demonstrate that entanglement sharing, as well as other unique features of entanglement, e.g. the fact that maximal information about a multipartite quantum system does not necessarily entail maximal information about its component subsystems, may be understood as specific consequences of the phenomenon of complementarity extended to composite quantum systems. We also present a local hidden-variable model supplemented by an efficient amount of classical communication that reproduces the quantum-mechanical predictions for the entire class of Gottesman-Knill circuits. The success of our simulation provides strong evidence that the power of quantum computation arises not directly from entanglement, but rather from the nonexistence of an efficient, local realistic description of the computation, even when augmented by an efficient amount of nonlocal, but classical communication. Finally, we note that the findings presented in this thesis support the conjecture that Hilbert space dimension is an objective property of a quantum system since it constrains the number of valid conceptual divisions of the system into subsystems.
This thesis establishes a number of connections between foundational issues in quantum theory, and some quantum information applications. It starts with a review of quantum contextuality and non-locality, multipartite entanglement characterisation, and of a few quantum information protocols. Quantum non-locality and contextuality are shown to be essential for different implementations of quantum information protocols known as quantum random access codes and quantum communication complexity protocols. I derive sufficient experimental conditions for tests of these quantum properties. I also discuss how the distribution of quantum information through quantum cloning processes can be useful in quantum computing. Regarding entanglement characterisation, some results are obtained relating two problems, that of additivity of the relative entropy of entanglement, and that of identifying different types of tripartite entanglement in the asymptotic regime of manipulations of many copies of a given state. The thesis ends with a description of an information processing task in which a single qubit substitutes for an arbitrarily large amount of classical communication. This result is interpreted in different ways: as a gap between quantum and classical computation space complexity; as a bound on the amount of classical communication necessary to simulate entanglement; and as a basic result on hidden-variable theories for quantum mechanics. I also show that the advantage of quantum over classical communication can be established in a feasible experiment.
We derive two complementarity relations that constrain the individual and bipartite properties that may simultaneously exist in a multi-qubit system. The first expression, valid for an arbitrary pure state of n qubits, demonstrates that the degree to which single particle properties are possessed by an individual member of the system is limited by the bipartite entanglement that exists between that qubit and the remainder of the system. This result implies that the phenomenon of entanglement sharing is one specific consequence of complementarity. The second expression, which holds for an arbitrary state of two qubits, pure or mixed, quantifies a tradeoff between the amounts of entanglement, separable uncertainty, and single particle properties that are encoded in the quantum state. The separable uncertainty is a natural measure of our ignorance about the properties possessed by individual subsystems, and may be used to completely characterize the relationship between entanglement and mixedness in two-qubit systems. The two-qubit complementarity relation yields a useful geometric picture in which the root mean square values of local subsystem properties act like coordinates in the space of density matrices, and suggests possible insights into the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics.
Entanglement is one of most peculiar characteristic of Quantum Mechanics (probably the other most mentioned is the particle tunneling through a barrier) because it entails correlations that supersedes classical correlations. It is conceived as the genuine quantum characteristic by many researchers and quite recently it has emerged as a physical resource to produce non-classical task, like quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography and quantum information. Entanglement could be distributed (efficient quantum communication is equivalent to efficient entanglement distribution (Plenio & Virmani, 2007)), concentrated (given an amount of entanglement, equal to the full content of entanglement in n pairs of identical entangled pure state systems, it is possible, using local operations on each system, to concentrate the total amount of entanglement into a smaller number m, m < n, of maximally pure entangled state system (Bennett, et al.; 1996)) and used to perform many quantum information tasks useful to overcome technical restrictions present on classical communication. In this chapter, we review the entanglement of quantum mechanical systems. First, in Section 2, we give a characterization of entanglement in terms of its special features as resource and its mathematical structure. Then, in section 3, we review some of the Bell inequalities. In Sections 4 and 5, we review some of the most important entanglement measures published for two and three entangled systems. After that, in Section 6, we give a characterization of quantum gates and operators by its entanglement power, i. e. the amount of entanglement that they can produce when acting on an arbitrary state. Finally, in Section 7, we briefly review the experimental detection of entanglement.
Quantum mechanics is nonlocal, meaning it cannot be described by any classical local hidden variable model. In this thesis we study two aspects of quantum nonlocality. Part I addresses the question of what classical resources are required to simulate nonlocal quantum correlations. We start by constructing new local models for noisy entangled quantum states. These constructions exploit the connection between nonlocality and Grothendieck's inequality, first noticed by Tsirelson. Next, we consider local models augmented by a limited amount of classical communication. After generalizing Bell inequalities to this setting, we show that (i) one bit of communication is sufficient to simulate the correlations of projective measurements on a maximally entangled state of two qubits, and (ii) five bits of communication are sufficient to simulate the joint correlation of two-outcome measurements on any bipartite quantum state. The latter result can be interpreted as a stronger (constrained) version of Grothendieck's inequality. In part II, we investigate the monogamy of nonlocal correlations. In a setting where three parties, A, B, and C, share an entangled quantum state of arbitrary dimension, we: (i) bound the trade-off between AB's and AC's violation of the CHSH inequality, obtaining an intriguing generalization of Tsirelson's bound, and (ii) demonstrate that forcing B and C to be classically correlated prevents A and B from violating certain Bell inequalities. We study not only correlations that arise within quantum theory, but also arbitrary correlations that do not allow signaling between separate groups of parties. These results are based on new techniques for obtaining Tsirelson bounds, or bounds on the quantum value of a Bell inequality, and have applications to interactive proof systems and cryptography.
Quantum mechanics has been a paradigm shift and a revolutionary framework in our understanding of the physical world. The theory has been able to describe a wide variety of phenomena and has been experimentally verified with great precision. Despite that, to this day, the seemingly ad hoc formulation of quantum theory and several of its features still elude an intuitive understanding. At the same time, the applications of quantum mechanics in information theory have emerged as a promising avenue. Namely, its potential advantages in computation, in the so-called nascent field of quantum computation and in communication and information processing tasks such as quantum teleportation and super-dense coding. In all these endeavours, a significant effort has been made in understanding the maximum extent to which quantum mechanics can provide an advantage. This thesis explores an intersection of these two research lines, i.e. to have a physical explanation of some of the features of quantum mechanics and at the same time, study the outer limits of quantum mechanics. The combining insight rests on a newer foundational idea: that information itself is physical rather than an abstract entity and thus, is subject to physical laws. In this thesis, we explore the principle of information causality, which states that in any communication scenario, the amount of information carried is bounded by the degrees of freedom of the carrier. Information causality was initially proposed as a physical principle aimed at deriving the predictions of quantum mechanics on the type of correlations observed in a Bell scenario, which is a communication scenario involving multiple parties with access to a shared randomness resource. This principle has been proposed to recover some of the well-known features of quantum mechanics, specifically Tsirelson’s bound of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality. Earlier results found limited generalisations due to the difficulty of deducing implications of the information causality principle. In this thesis, we greatly expand the scope of applicability of the principle. We develop a general-purpose algorithm to derive constraints on the set of quantum correlations. We extend the principle to be applicable to a wider variety of Bell scenarios, derive new families of quantum Bell inequalities and prove new bounds on the success probabilities of Entanglement Assisted Random Access Codes. We introduce an extension of the principle which applies to any distributed computing scenario. Using this extension, we improve on several previously known results in the field, and in certain cases, we even recover part of the quantum set as well. This extension provides rich insights into the communication complexity of distributed functions, using which we prove theory-independent randomised communication complexity bounds for several well-known functions and provide another general-purpose algorithm to bound the randomised quantum communication complexity of any function. As a consequence of the extension, we also establish that the extension supersedes the principle of non-trivial communication complexity.
Distributed quantum information processing is a promising platform for scaling up quantum information processing, where small- and intermediate-scale quantum devices are connected by a network of quantum channels for communicating quantum information, so as to cooperate in achieving larger-scale information processing. In such distributed settings, entangled states shared among the multiple devices serve as a resource for achieving nonlocal information processing tasks by local operations and classical communication (LOCC), where transformations of multipartite entangled states play central roles. This thesis analyzes properties of quantum entanglement in these small- and intermediate-scale settings and multipartite settings. The first part of this thesis investigates a communication task, quantum state merging, on the small and intermediate scales. The second part of this thesis analyzes multipartite entanglement in distributed quantum information processing. These analyses clarify fundamental limitations and potential applications of distributed quantum information processing to characterize properties of quantum entanglement in the small- and intermediate-scale settings and multipartite settings, providing a paradigm for investigating multipartite entanglement in distributed quantum information processing over networks beyond the state convertibility under LOCC.