arXiv subjects

Armin Tavakoli

Publications and source records attributed to Armin Tavakoli.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

Binarisation-loophole-free observation of high-dimensional quantum nonlocality

Bell inequality tests based on high-dimensional entanglement usually require measurements that can resolve multiple possible outcomes. However, the implementation of high-dimensional multi-outcome measurements is often only emulated via a collection of ``click or no-click'' measurements. This reduction of multi-outcome measurements to binary-outcome measurements opens a loophole in high-dimensional tests Bell inequalities which can be exploited by local hidden variable models [Tavakoli et al., Phys. Rev. A 111, 042433 (2025)]. Here, we close this loophole by using four-dimensional photonic path-mode entanglement and multi-outcome detection. We test both the well-known Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu inequality and a related Bell inequality tailored for maximally entangled states in high-dimension. We observe violations that are large enough to also rule out any quantum model based on entanglement of lower dimension, thereby demonstrating genuinely high-dimensional nonlocality free of the binarisation loophole.

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arXiv2025

The role of entanglement in energy-restricted communication and randomness generation

A promising platform for semi-device-independent quantum information is prepare-and-measure experiments restricted only by a bound on the energy of the communication. Here, we investigate the role of shared entanglement in such scenarios. For classical communication, we derive a general correlation criterion for nonlocal resources and use it to show that entanglement can fail to be a resource in standard tasks. For quantum communication, we consider the basic primitive for energy-constrained communication, namely the probabilistic transmission of a bit, and show that the advantages of entanglement only can be unlocked by non-unitary encoding schemes that purposefully decohere the entangled state. We also find that these advantages can be increased by using entanglement of higher dimension than qubit. We leverage these insights to investigate the impact of entanglement for quantum random number generation, which is a standard application of these systems but whose security so far only has been established against classical side information. In the low-energy regime, our attacks on the protocol indicate that the security remains largely intact, thereby paving the way for strengthened security without more complex setups and with negligible performance reductions.

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arXiv2025

Observing High-dimensional Bell Inequality Violations using Multi-Outcome Spectral Measurements

Violation of Bell inequalities is an essential requirement for many quantum information and communication protocols. In high-dimensional systems, Bell inequality tests face the challenge of implementing genuinely multi-outcome measurements, since the emulation of these with separate dichotomic projections opens a binarisation loophole that local hidden variable theories can exploit. Here we show that the joint spectral intensity of a two-photon entangled state contains access to the necessary multi-outcome measurements to overcome this obstacle and certify and violate a Bell inequality for high-dimensional states. This result is contrary to the belief that the joint spectral intensity is a phase-insensitive quantity and does not have sufficient information to certify entanglement or Bell-nonlocality. Using this approach, we violate the CGLMP Bell inequality up to dimension d = 8, all with negligible p-values, and for the first time close the binarisation loophole in high-dimensional Bell experiments. Guaranteeing Bell-nonlocal correlations using frequency-only measurements removes the technological hurdle of measurements in the temporal domain, thus greatly simplifying any practical implementation of future high-dimensional quantum information protocols.

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arXiv2025

Simulating quantum instruments with projective measurements and quantum post-processing

Quantum instruments describe both the classical outcome and the updated state associated with a quantum measurement. We ask whether these processes can be simulated using only a natural subset of resources, namely projective measurements on the system and quantum processing of the post-measurement states. We show that the simulability of instruments can be connected to an entanglement classification problem. This leads to a computationally efficient necessary condition for simulation of generic instruments and to a complete characterisation for qubits. We use this to address relevant quantum information tasks, namely (i) the noise-tolerance of standard qubit unsharp measurements, (ii) non-projective advantages in information-disturbance trade-offs, and (iii) increased sequential Bell inequality violations under projective measurements. Moreover, we consider also $d$-dimensional Lüders instruments that correspond to weak versions of standard basis measurements and show that for large $d$ these can permit scalable noise-advantages over projective implementations.

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arXiv2025

Observation of Genuine High-dimensional Multi-partite Non-locality in Entangled Photon States

Quantum information science has leaped forward with the exploration of high-dimensional quantum systems, offering greater potential than traditional qubits in quantum communication and quantum computing. To advance the field of high-dimensional quantum technology, a significant effort is underway to progressively enhance the entanglement dimension between two particles. An alternative effective strategy involves not only increasing the dimensionality but also expanding the number of particles that are entangled. We present an experimental study demonstrating multi-partite quantum non-locality beyond qubit constraints, thus moving into the realm of strongly entangled high-dimensional multi-particle quantum systems. In the experiment, quantum states were encoded in the path degree of freedom (DoF) and controlled via polarization, enabling efficient operations in a two-dimensional plane to prepare three- and four-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states in three-level systems. Our experimental results reveal ways in which high-dimensional systems can surpass qubits in terms of violating local-hidden-variable theories. Our realization of multiple complex and high-quality entanglement technologies is an important primary step for more complex quantum computing and communication protocols.

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arXiv2025

Unlimited quantum correlation advantage from bound entanglement

Entangled states that cannot be distilled to maximal entanglement are called bound entangled and they are often viewed as too weak to break the limitations of classical models. Here, we show a strongly contrasting result: that bound entangled states, when deployed as resources between two senders who communicate with a receiver, can generate correlation advantages of unlimited magnitude. The proof is based on using many copies of a bound entangled state to assist quantum communication. We show that in order to simulate the correlations predicted by bound entanglement, one requires in the many-copy limit either an entanglement visibility that tends to zero or a diverging amount of overhead communication. This capability of bound entanglement is unlocked by only using elementary single-qubit operations. The result shows that bound entanglement can be a scalable resource for breaking the limitations of physical models without access to entanglement.

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arXiv2025

Specifying the Intrinsic Back-action of a General Measurement

Understanding the invasive nature of quantum measurement and its implications in quantum foundations and information science demands a mathematically rigorous and physically well-grounded characterization of intrinsic back-action in general measurement processes. However, such a framework remains elusive, leaving a critical gap in quantum theory. Here, we address this issue by conceptualizing a general quantum measurement as a reduction of extended projection measurements ensured by Naimark's theorem and, derive a state-updating rule for the concerned measurement as a reduction of the projective measurements postulate. Our framework provides a detailed analysis by explicitly decomposing the disturbance effects into two distinct contributions: those arising from the measurement elements themselves and those resulting from the dilation process. Notably, this formulation naturally recovers the projection postulate in the case of projective measurements. Beyond providing insights into joint measurability, non-disturbance, our rule establishes quantitaive connections between intrinsic disturbance and other fundamental quantum features, such as randomness, uncertainty, and information gain.

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arXiv2025

Binarisation of multi-outcome measurements in high-dimensional quantum correlation experiments

High-dimensional systems are an important frontier for photonic quantum correlation experiments. These correlation tests commonly prescribe measurements with many possible outcomes but they are often implemented through many individual binary-outcome measurements that use only a single-detector. Here, we discuss how this binarisation procedure for multi-outcome measurements can open a loophole, unless specific device-characterisation assumptions are satisfied. We highlight that correlation tests designed for multi-outcome measurements can be trivialised in binarised implementations and we then show how to accurately analyse binarised data to reveal its quantum features. For seminal types of correlation experiments, such as Bell inequality tests, steering tests and prepare-and-measure experiments, we find that binarisation may incur a sizable cost in the magnitude of quantum advantages. This emphasizes the importance of both accurate data analysis and implementing genuinely multi-outcome measurements in high-dimensional correlation experiments.

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arXiv2025

Imprecision plateaus in quantum steering

We study tests of quantum steering in which the trusted party does not have perfect control of their measurements. We report on steering inequalities that remain unaffected when introducing up to a threshold magnitude of measurement imprecision. This phenomenon, which we call an imprecision plateau, thus permits a departure from the standard assumption of idealised measurements without any incuring cost to the detection power of steering experiments. We provide an explanation for why imprecision plateaus are possible, a simple criterion for their existence and tools for analysing their properties. We also demonstrate that these plateaus have natural applications when the assumption of perfect measurements is relaxed: they allow for maintaining both the noise- and loss-robustness of standard steering tests and the performance rate of idealised one-sided device-independent random number generators.

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arXiv2025

Compression of Entanglement Improves Quantum Communication

Shared entanglement can significantly amplify classical correlations between systems interacting over a limited quantum channel. A natural avenue is to use entanglement of the same dimension as the channel because this allows for unitary encodings, which preserve global coherence until a measurement is performed. Contrasting this, we here demonstrate a distributed task based on a qubit channel, for which irreversible encoding operations can outperform any possible coherence-preserving protocol. This corresponds to using high-dimensional entanglement and encoding information by compressing one of the subsystems into a qubit. Demonstrating this phenomenon requires the preparation of a four-dimensional maximally entangled state, the compression of two qubits into one and joint qubit-ququart entangled measurements, with all modules executed at near-optimal fidelity. We report on a proof-of-principle experiment that achieves the advantage by realizing separate systems in distinct and independently controlled paths of a single photon. Our result demonstrates the relevance of high-dimensional entanglement and non-unitary operations for enhancing the communication capabilities of standard qubit transmissions.

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arXiv2025

Simple and general bounds on quantum random access codes

Random access codes are a type of communication task that is widely used in quantum information science. The optimal average success probability that can be achieved through classical strategies is known for any random access code. However, only a few cases are solved exactly for quantum random access codes. In this paper, we provide bounds for the fully general setting of n independent variables, each selected from a d-dimensional classical alphabet and encoded in a D-dimensional quantum system subject to an arbitrary quantum measurement. The bound recovers the exactly known special cases, and we demonstrate numerically that even though the bound is not tight overall, it can still yield a good approximation.

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arXiv2025

Bound entangled states are useful in prepare-and-measure scenarios

We show that bipartite bound entangled states make possible violations of correlation inequalities in the prepare-and-measure scenario. These inequalities are satisfied by all classical models as well as by all quantum models that do not feature entanglement. In contrast to the known Bell inequality violations from bound entangled states, we find that the violations in the prepare-and-measure scenario are sizeable and significantly noise-tolerant. Furthermore, we show that significantly stronger quantum correlations are made possible by considering bound entanglement with a larger dimension.

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arXiv2025

Information capacity of quantum communication under natural physical assumptions

The quantum prepare-and-measure scenario has been studied under various physical assumptions on the emitted states. Here, we first discuss how different assumptions are conceptually and formally related. We then identify one that can serve as a relaxation of all others, corresponding to a limitation on the one-shot accessible information of the state ensemble. This motivates us to study the optimal state discrimination probability of a source subject to these various physical assumptions. We derive general and tight bounds for states restricted by their quantum dimension, their vacuum component, an arbitrary uniform overlap, the magnitude of higher-dimensional signals and the experimenter's trust in their device. Our results constitute a first step towards a more unified picture of semi-device-independent quantum information processing.

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arXiv2025

Quantum stochastic communication via high-dimensional entanglement

Entanglement has the ability to enhance the transmission of classical information over a quantum channel. However, fully harvesting this advantage typically requires complex entangling measurements, which are challenging to implement and scale with the system's size. In this work, we consider a natural quantum information primitive in which the message to be communicated is selected stochastically. We introduce a protocol that leverages high-dimensional entanglement to perform this task perfectly, without requiring quantum interference between particles at the measurement station. We experimentally demonstrate the protocol's scalability in an optical setup using 8-dimensional entanglement and multi-outcome detection, providing a practical solution for stochastic communication and a robust method for certifying the dimensionality of entanglement in communication experiments.

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arXiv2025

Semidefinite relaxations for high-dimensional entanglement in the steering scenario

We introduce semidefinite programming hierarchies for benchmarking relevant entanglement properties in the high-dimensional steering scenario. Firstly, we provide a general method for detecting the entanglement dimensionality through certification of the Schmidt number. Its key feature is that the computational cost is independent of the Schmidt number under consideration. Secondly, we provide a method to estimate the fidelity of the source with any maximally entangled state. Using only basic computational means, we demonstrate the usefulness of these methods, which can be directly used to analyse experiments on high-dimensional systems.

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arXiv2025

Maximal steady-state entanglement in autonomous quantum thermal machines

We devise an autonomous quantum thermal machine consisting of three pairwise-interacting qubits, two of which are locally coupled to thermal reservoirs. The machine operates autonomously, as it requires no time-coherent control, external driving or quantum bath engineering, and is instead propelled by a chemical potential bias. Under ideal conditions, we show that this out-of-equilibrium system can deterministically generate a maximally entangled steady-state between two of the qubits, or any desired pure two-qubit entangled state, emerging as a dark state of the system. We study the robustness of entanglement production with respect to several relevant parameters, obtaining nearly-maximally-entangled states well-away from the ideal regime of operation. Furthermore, we show that our machine architecture can be generalised to a configuration with $2n-1$ qubits, in which only a potential bias and two-body interactions are sufficient to generate genuine multipartite maximally entangled steady states in the form of a W state of $n$ qubits.

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arXiv2024

Absolute dimensionality of quantum ensembles

The dimension of a quantum state is traditionally seen as the number of superposed distinguishable states in a given basis. We propose an absolute, i.e.~basis-independent, notion of dimensionality for ensembles of quantum states. It is based on whether a quantum ensemble can be simulated with states confined to arbitrary lower-dimensional subspaces and classical postprocessing. In order to determine the absolute dimension of quantum ensembles, we develop both analytical witness criteria and a semidefinite programming criterion based on the ensemble's information capacity. Furthermore, we construct explicit simulation models for arbitrary ensembles of pure quantum states subject to white noise, and in natural cases we prove their optimality. Also, efficient numerical methods are provided for simulating generic ensembles. Finally, we discuss the role of absolute dimensionality in high-dimensional quantum information processing.

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arXiv2024

Prepare-and-measure scenarios with photon-number constraints

We study correlations in the prepare-and-measure scenario when quantum communication is constrained by photon-number statistics. Such constraints are natural and practical control parameters for semi-device-independent certification in optical platforms. To analyse these scenarios, we show how semidefinite programming relaxations for non-commutative polynomial optimization can be used to bound the set of quantum correlations under restrictions on the photon-number distribution. The practicality of this method is demonstrated by computing optimal performance bounds on several well-known communication tasks. We then apply the method to the certification of semi-device-inpependent random number generation protocols and show how to bound the conditional Shannon entropy. We showcase this versatile tool by improving randomness extraction in established protocols based on coherent states and homodyne measurements.

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