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arXiv:quant-ph/9909046 · Physical Review A

Phase-covariant quantum cloning

Dagmar Bruß, Mirko Cinchetti, Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano, Chiara Macchiavello

Published Jun 7, 2000• 300 citations
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Abstract

We consider an $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{N}M$ quantum cloning transformation acting on pure two-level states lying on the equator of the Bloch sphere. An upper bound for its fidelity is presented, by establishing a connection between optimal phase-covariant cloning and phase estimation. We give the explicit form of a cloning transformation that achieves the bound for the case $N=1,$ $M=2,$ and find a link between this case and optimal eavesdropping in the quantum cryptographic scheme BB84.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.62.012302

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We consider an N\ensuremath→M\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{N}MN\ensuremath→​M quantum cloning transformation acting on pure two-level states lying on the equator of the Bloch sphere. An upper bound for its fidelity is presented, by establishing a connection between optimal phase-covariant cloning and phase estimation. We give the explicit form of a cloning transformation that achieves the bound for the case N=1,N=1,N=1, M=2,M=2,M=2, and find a link between this case and optimal eavesdropping in the quantum cryptographic scheme BB84.
It is known that in phase-covariant quantum cloning, the equatorial states on the Bloch sphere can be cloned with a fidelity higher than the optimal bound established for universal quantum cloning. We generalize this concept to include other states on the Bloch sphere with a definite z component of spin. It is shown that once we know the z component, we can always clone a state with a fidelity higher than the universal value and that of equatorial states. We also make a detailed study of the entanglement properties of the output copies and show that the equatorial states are the only states that give rise to a separable density matrix for the outputs.
We find an optimal quantum cloning machine, which clones qubits of arbitrary symmetrical distribution around the Bloch vector with the highest fidelity. The process is referred to as phase-independent cloning in contrast to the standard phase-covariant cloning for which an input qubit state is a priori better known. We assume that the information about the input state is encoded in an arbitrary axisymmetric distribution (phase function) on the Bloch sphere of the cloned qubits. We find analytical expressions describing the optimal cloning transformation and fidelity of the clones. As an illustration, we analyze cloning of qubit state described by the von Mises--Fisher and Brosseau distributions. Moreover, we show that the optimal phase-independent cloning machine can be implemented by modifying the mirror phase-covariant cloning machine for which quantum circuits are known.
We study state-dependent quantum cloning that can outperform universal cloning (UC).This is possible by using some a priori information on a given quantum state to be cloned.Specifically, we propose a generalization and optical implementation of quantum optimal mirror phase-covariant cloning, which refers to optimal cloning of sets of qubits of known modulus of the expectation value of Pauli's Z operator.Our results can be applied to cloning of an arbitrary mirror-symmetric distribution of qubits on the Bloch sphere including in special cases UC and phase-covariant cloning.We show that the cloning is optimal by adapting our former optimality proof for axisymmetric cloning (Bartkiewicz and Miranowicz 2010 Phys.Rev. A 82 042330).Moreover, we propose an optical realization of the optimal mirror phase-covariant 1 → 2 cloning of a qubit, for which the mean probability of successful cloning varies from 1/6 to 1/3 depending on prior information on the set of qubits to be cloned.The qubits are represented by polarization states of photons generated by the type-I spontaneous parametric down-conversion.The scheme is based on the interference of two photons on an unbalanced polarization-dependent beam splitter with different splitting ratios for vertical and horizontal polarization components and the additional application of feedforward by means of Pockels cells.The experimental feasibility of the proposed setup is carefully studied including various kinds of imperfections and losses.Moreover, we briefly describe two possible cryptographic applications of the optimal mirror phase-covariant cloning corresponding to state discrimination (or estimation) and secure quantum teleportation.
We investigate the asymptotic relationship between quantum cloning and quantum estimation from the global point of view where all the copies produced by the cloner are considered jointly. For an N-to-M cloner, we consider the overall fidelity between the state of the M output systems and the state of M ideal copies, and we ask whether the optimal fidelity is attained by a measure and-prepare protocol in the limit M -> \infty. In order to gain intuition into the general problem, we analyze two concrete examples: i) cloning qubit states on the equator of the Bloch sphere and ii) cloning two-qubit maximally entangled states. In the first case, we show that the optimal measure-and-prepare fidelity converges to the fidelity of the optimal cloner in the limit M -> \infty. In the second case, we restrict our attention to economical covariant cloners, and again, we exhibit a measure-and-prepare protocol that achieves asymptotically the optimal fidelity. Quite counterintuitively, in both cases the optimal states that have to be prepared in order to maximize the overall fidelity are not product states corresponding to M identical copies, but instead suitable M-partite entangled states.
Following the work of Niu and Griffiths, in \emph{Phys.Rev.A 58, 4377(1998)}, we shall investigate the problem, how to design the optimal quantum cloning machines (QCMs) for qubit system, with the help of Bloch-sphere representation. In stead of the quality factor there, the Fiuráusek's optimal condition, where the optimal cloning machine should maximize a convex mixture of the average fidelity, is used as the optimality criterion in present protocol. Almost all of the known optimal QCMs in previous works, the cloning for states with fixed polar angle, the phase-covariant cloning, the universal QCMs, the cloning for two arbitrary pure states, and the mirror phase-covariant cloning, should be discussed in a systematic way. The known results, the optimal fidelities for various input ensembles according to different optimality criteria, are recovered here. Our present scheme also offers a general way of constructing the unitary transformation to realize the optimal cloning.