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Berthold-Georg Englert

Publications and source records attributed to Berthold-Georg Englert.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources
arXiv2003

Tutorial Notes on One-Party and Two-Party Gaussian States

Gaussian states -- or, more generally, Gaussian operators -- play an important role in Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Science, both in discussions about conceptual issues and in practical applications. We describe, in a tutorial manner, a systematic operator method for first characterizing such states and then investigating their properties. The central numerical quantities are the covariance matrix that specifies the characteristic function of the state, and the closely related matrices associated with Wigner's and Glauber's phase space functions. For pedagogical reasons, we restrict the discussion to one-dimensional and two-dimensional Gaussian states, for which we provide illustrating and instructive examples.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2003

How well can you know the edge of a quantum pyramid?

The methods of quantum cryptography enable one to have perfectly secure communication lines, whereby the laws of quantum physics protect the privacy of the data exchanged. Each quantum-cryptography scheme has its own security criteria that need to be met in a practical implementation. We find, however, that the generally accepted criteria are flawed for a whole class of such schemes.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2003

Tomographic Quantum Cryptography

We present a protocol for quantum cryptography in which the data obtained for mismatched bases are used in full for the purpose of quantum state tomography. Eavesdropping on the quantum channel is seriously impeded by requiring that the outcome of the tomography is consistent with unbiased noise in the channel. We study the incoherent eavesdropping attacks that are still permissible and establish under which conditions a secure cryptographic key can be generated. The whole analysis is carried out for channels that transmit quantum systems of any finite dimension.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2003

Tomographic Quantum Cryptography: Equivalence of Quantum and Classical Key Distillation

The security of a cryptographic key that is generated by communication through a noisy quantum channel relies on the ability to distill a shorter secure key sequence from a longer insecure one. For an important class of protocols, which exploit tomographically complete measurements on entangled pairs of any dimension, we show that the noise threshold for classical advantage distillation is identical with the threshold for quantum entanglement distillation. As a consequence, the two distillation procedures are equivalent: neither offers a security advantage over the other.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2003

Ascertaining the Values of $σ_x$, $σ_y$, and $σ_z$ of a Polarization Qubit

In the 1987 spin retrodiction puzzle of Vaidman, Aharonov, and Albert one is challenged to ascertain the values of $σ_x$, $σ_y$, and $σ_z$ of a spin-1/2 particle by utilizing entanglement. We report the experimental realization of a quantum-optical version in which the outcome of an intermediate polarization projection is inferred by exploiting single-photon two-qubit quantum gates. The experimental success probability is consistently above the 90.2% threshold of the optimal one-qubit strategy, with an average success probability of 95.6%.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2003

Information theoretic approach to single-particle and two-particle interference in multi-path interferometers

We propose entropic measures for the strength of single-particle and two-particle interference in interferometric experiments where each particle of a pair traverses a multi-path interferometer. Optimal single-particle interference excludes any two-particle interference, and vice versa. We report an inequality that states the compromises allowed by quantum mechanics in intermediate situations, and identify a class of two-particle states for which the upper bound is reached. Our approach is applicable to symmetric two-partite systems of any finite dimension.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2002

One-atom maser: Non-separable atom pairs

When a one-atom maser is operated in the standard way -- excited, resonant two-level atoms traverse the resonator at random times -- the emerging atoms are entangled with the cavity field. As a consequence, the results of measurements on different atoms tend to be correlated. We show that truly non-classical correlations can be found between two successive atoms by studying the properties of the reduced state of such an atom pair. In particular, we calculate its degree of separability and find parameter ranges in which it is markedly less than unity.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2002

Secure communication with single-photon two-qubit states

We propose a cryptographic scheme that is deterministic: Alice sends single photons to Bob, and each and every photon detected supplies one key bit -- no photon is wasted. This is in marked contrast to other schemes in which a random process decides whether the next photon sent will contribute to the key or not. The determinism is achieved by preparing the photons in two-qubit states, rather than the one-qubit states used in conventional schemes. In particular, we consider the realistic situation in which one qubit is the photon polarization, the other a spatial alternative. Further, we show how one can exploit the deterministic nature for direct secure communication, that is: without the need for establishing a shared key first.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2002

Five Lectures On Dissipative Master Equations

1 First Lecture: Basics 1.1 Physical Derivation of the Master Equation 1.2 Some Simple Implications 1.3 Steady State 1.4 Action to the Left 2 Second Lecture: Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors of L 2.1 A Simple Case First 2.2 The General Case 3 Third Lecture: Completeness of the Damping Bases 3.1 Phase Space Functions 3.2 Completeness of the Eigenvectors of L 3.3 Positivity Conservation 3.4 Lindblad Form of Liouville Operators 4 Fourth Lecture: Quantum-Optical Applications 4.1 Periodically Driven Damped Oscillator 4.2 Conditional and Unconditional Evolution 4.3 Physical Signicance of Statistical Operators 5 Fifth Lecture: Statistics of Detected Atoms 5.1 Correlation Functions 5.2 Waiting Time Statistics 5.3 Counting Statistics

quant-ph↗
arXiv2002

Secure communication with a publicly known key

We present a scheme for direct and confidential communication between Alice and Bob, where there is no need for establishing a shared secret key first, and where the key used by Alice even will become known publicly. The communication is based on the exchange of single photons and each and every photon transmits one bit of Alice's message without revealing any information to a potential eavesdropper.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2002

Statistics of dressed modes in a thermal state

By a Wigner-function calculation, we evaluate the trace of a certain Gaussian operator arising in the theory of a boson system subject to both finite temperature and (weak) interaction. Thereby we rederive (and generalize) a recent result by Kocharovsky, Kocharovsky, and Scully [Phys. Rev. A, vol. 61, art. 053606 (2000)] in a way that is technically much simpler. One step uses a special case of the response of Wigner functions to linear transformations, and we demonstrate the general case by simple means. As an application we extract the counting statistics for each mode of the Bose gas.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2002

Elements of Micromaser Physics

The elements of micromaser physics are reviewed in a tutorial way. The emphasis is on the basic theoretical concepts, not on technical details or experimental subtleties. After a brief treatment of the atom-photon interaction according to the Jaynes-Cummings model, the master equation that governs the dynamics of the one-atom maser is derived. Then the more important properties of the steady states of the one-atom maser are discussed, including the trapped states. The approximations, upon which the standard theoretical model of the one-atom maser is based, are exhibited. The methods by which one calculates statistical properties of the emerging atoms are hinted at.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2001

Measuring irreversible dynamics of a quantum harmonic oscillator

We show that the unitary evolution of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a two-level system can be undone by a suitable manipulation of the two-level system -- more specifically: by a quasi-instantaneous phase change. This enables us to isolate the dissipative evolution to which the oscillator may be exposed in addition. With this method we study the decoherence of a photon mode in cavity QED, and that of the quantized harmonic motion of trapped ions. We comment on the relation to spin echoes and multi-path interferometry.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2001

Separability of Two-Party Gaussian States

We investigate the separability properties of quantum two-party Gaussian states in the framework of the operator formalism for the density operator. Such states arise as natural generalizations of the entangled state originally introduced by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. We present explicit forms of separable and nonseparable Gaussian states.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2001

Semiclassical theory of trapped fermionic dipoles

We investigate the properties of a degenerate dilute gas of neutral fermionic particles in a harmonic trap that interact via dipole-dipole forces. We employ the semiclassical Thomas-Fermi method and discuss the Dirac correction to the interaction energy. A nearly analytic as well as an exact numerical minimization of the Thomas-Fermi-Dirac energy functional are performed in order to obtain the density distribution. We determine the stability of the system as a function of the interaction strength, the particle number, and the trap geometry. We find that there are interaction strengths and particle numbers for which the gas cannot be trapped stably in a spherically symmetric trap, but both prolate and oblate traps will work successfully.

cond-mat↗
arXiv2001

Universal unitary gate for single-photon 2-qubit states

Upon entangling a spatial binary alternative of a photon with its polarization, one can use single photons to study arbitrary 2-qubit states. Sending the photon through a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, equipped with sets of wave plates that change the polarization, amounts to performing a unitary transformation on the 2-qubit state. We show that any desired unitary gate can be realized by a judicious choice of the parameters of the set-up and discuss a number of applications. They include the diagnosis of an unknown 2-qubit state, an optical Grover search, and the realization of a thought experiment invented by Vaidman, Aharonov, and Albert.

quant-ph↗