arXiv subjects

Damian Markham

Publications and source records attributed to Damian Markham.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Experimental quantum triangle network nonlocality with an AlGaAs multiplexed entangled photon source

The exploration of the concept of nonlocality beyond standard Bell scenarios in quantum network architectures unveils fundamentally new forms of correlations that hold a strong potential for future applications of quantum communication networks. To materialize this potential, it is necessary to adapt theoretical advances to realistic configurations. Here we consider a quantum triangle network, for which is was shown in theory that, remarkably, quantum nonlocality without inputs can be demonstrated for sources with an arbitrarily small level of independence. We realize experimentally such correlated sources by carefully engineering the output state of a single AlGaAs multiplexed entangled-photon source, exploiting energy-matched channels cut in its broad spectrum. This simulated triangle network is then used to violate experimentally for the first time a Bell-like inequality that we derive to capture the effect of noise in the correlations present in our system. We also rigorously validate our findings by analysing the mutual information between the generated states. Our results allow us to deepen our understanding of network nonlocality while also pushing its practical relevance for quantum communication networks.

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arXiv2024

Corrected Bell and Noncontextuality Inequalities for Realistic Experiments

Contextuality is a feature of quantum correlations. It is crucial from a foundational perspective as a nonclassical phenomenon, and from an applied perspective as a resource for quantum advantage. It is commonly defined in terms of hidden variables, for which it forces a contradiction with the assumptions of parameter-independence and determinism. The former can be justified by the empirical property of non-signalling or non-disturbance, and the latter by the empirical property of measurement sharpness. However, in realistic experiments neither empirical property holds exactly, which leads to possible objections to contextuality as a form of nonclassicality, and potential vulnerabilities for supposed quantum advantages. We introduce measures to quantify both properties, and introduce quantified relaxations of the corresponding assumptions. We prove the continuity of a known measure of contextuality, the contextual fraction, which ensures its robustness to noise. We then bound the extent to which these relaxations can account for contextuality, via corrections terms to the contextual fraction (or to any noncontextuality inequality), culminating in a notion of genuine contextuality, which is robust to experimental imperfections. We then show that our result is general enough to apply or relate to a variety of established results and experimental setups.

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arXiv2024

Privacy in networks of quantum sensors

We treat privacy in a network of quantum sensors where accessible information is limited to specific functions of the network parameters, and all other information remains private. We develop an analysis of privacy in terms of a manipulation of the quantum Fisher information matrix, and find the optimal state achieving maximum privacy in the estimation of linear combination of the unknown parameters in a network of quantum sensors. We also discuss the effect of uncorrelated noise on the privacy of the network. Moreover, we illustrate our results with an example where the goal is to estimate the average value of the unknown parameters in the network. In this example, we also introduce the notion of quasi-privacy ($ε$-privacy), quantifying how close the state is to being private.

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arXiv2024

Experimental Sample-Efficient and Device-Independent GHZ State Certification

The certification of quantum resources is a critical tool in the development of quantum information processing. In particular, quantum state verification is a fundamental building block for communication and computation applications, determining whether the involved parties can trust the resources at hand or whether the application should be aborted. Self-testing methods have been used to tackle such verification tasks in a device-independent (DI) setting. However, these approaches commonly consider the limit of large (asymptotic), identically and independently distributed (IID) samples, which weakens the DI claim and poses serious challenges to their experimental implementation. Here we overcome these challenges by adopting a theoretical protocol enabling the certification of quantum states in the few-copies and non-IID regime and by leveraging a high-fidelity multipartite entangled photon source. This allows us to show the efficient and device-independent certification of a single copy of a four-qubit GHZ state that can readily be used for the robust and reliable implementation of quantum information tasks.

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arXiv2024

All graph state verification protocols are composably secure

Graph state verification protocols allow multiple parties to share a graph state while checking that the state is honestly prepared, even in the presence of malicious parties. Since graph states are the starting point of numerous quantum protocols, it is crucial to ensure that graph state verification protocols can safely be composed with other protocols, this property being known as composable security. Previous works [YDK21] conjectured that such a property could not be proven within the abstract cryptography framework: we disprove this conjecture by showing that all graph state verification protocols can be turned into a composably secure protocol with respect to the natural functionality for graph state preparation. Moreover, we show that any unchanged graph state verification protocols can also be considered as composably secure for a slightly different, yet useful, functionality. Finally, we show that these two results are optimal, in the sense that any such generic result, considering arbitrary black-box protocols, must either modify the protocol or consider a different functionality. Along the way, we show a protocol to generalize entanglement swapping to arbitrary graph states that might be of independent interest.

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arXiv2023

Experimentally Certified Transmission of a Quantum Message through an Untrusted and Lossy Quantum Channel via Bell's Theorem

Quantum transmission links are central elements in essentially all protocols involving the exchange of quantum messages. Emerging progress in quantum technologies involving such links needs to be accompanied by appropriate certification tools. In adversarial scenarios, a certification method can be vulnerable to attacks if too much trust is placed on the underlying system. Here, we propose a protocol in a device independent framework, which allows for the certification of practical quantum transmission links in scenarios where minimal assumptions are made about the functioning of the certification setup. In particular, we take unavoidable transmission losses into account by modeling the link as a completely-positive trace-decreasing map. We also, crucially, remove the assumption of independent and identically distributed samples, which is known to be incompatible with adversarial settings. Finally, in view of the use of the certified transmitted states for follow-up applications, our protocol moves beyond certification of the channel to allow us to estimate the quality of the transmitted quantum message itself. To illustrate the practical relevance and the feasibility of our protocol with currently available technology we provide an experimental implementation based on a state-of-the-art polarization entangled photon pair source in a Sagnac configuration and analyze its robustness for realistic losses and errors.

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arXiv2022

Quantum Metrology with Delegated Tasks

A quantum metrology scheme can be decomposed into three quantum tasks: state preparation, parameter encoding and measurements. Consequently, it is imperative to have access to the technologies which can execute the aforementioned tasks to fully implement a quantum metrology scheme. In the absence of one or more of these technologies, one can proceed by delegating the tasks to a third party. However, doing so has security ramifications: the third party can bias the result or leak information. In this article, we outline different scenarios where one or more tasks are delegated to an untrusted (and possibly malicious) third party. In each scenario, we outline cryptographic protocols which can be used to circumvent malicious activity. Further, we link the effectiveness of the quantum metrology scheme to the soundness of the cryptographic protocols.

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arXiv2022

Inflated Graph States Refuting Communication-Assisted LHV Models

Standard Bell inequalities hold when distant parties are not allowed to communicate. Barrett et al. found correlations from Pauli measurements on certain network graphs refute a local hidden variable (LHV) description even allowing some communication along the graph. This has recently found applications in proving separation between classical and quantum computing, in terms of shallow circuits, and distributed computing. The correlations presented by Barrett et al. can be understood as coming from an extension of three party GHZ state correlations which can be embedded on a graph state. In this work, we propose systematic extensions of any graph state, which we dub inflated graph states such that they exhibit correlations which refute any communication assisted LHV model. We further show the smallest possible such example, with a 7-qubit linear graph state, as well as specially crafted smaller examples with 5 and 4 qubits. The latter is the smallest possible violation using binary inputs and outputs.

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arXiv2022

Private network parameter estimation with quantum sensors

Networks of quantum sensors are a central application of burgeoning quantum networks. A key question for the use of such networks will be their security, particularly against malicious participants of the network. We introduce a protocol to securely evaluate linear functions of parameters over a network of quantum sensors, ensuring that all parties only have access to the function value, and no access to the individual parameters. This has application to secure networks of clocks and opens the door to more general applications of secure multiparty computing to networks of quantum sensors.

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arXiv2022

Flow conditions for continuous variable measurement-based quantum computing

In measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC), computation is carried out by a sequence of measurements and corrections on an entangled state. Flow, and related concepts, are powerful techniques for characterising the dependence of the corrections on previous measurement results. We introduce flow-based methods for quantum computation with continuous-variable graph states, which we call CV-flow. These are inspired by, but not equivalent to, the notions of causal flow and g-flow for qubit MBQC. We also show that an MBQC with CV-flow approximates a unitary arbitrarily well in the infinite-squeezing limit, addressing issues of convergence which are unavoidable in the infinite-dimensional setting. In developing our proofs, we provide a method for converting a CV-MBQC computation into a circuit form, analogous to the circuit extraction method of Miyazaki et al, and an efficient algorithm for finding CV-flow when it exists based on the qubit version by Mhalla and Perdrix. Our results and techniques naturally extend to the cases of MBQC for quantum computation with qudits of prime local dimension.

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arXiv2022

Verification of graph states in an untrusted network

Graph states are a large class of multipartite entangled quantum states that form the basis of schemes for quantum computation, communication, error correction, metrology, and more. In this work, we consider verification of graph states generated by an untrusted source and shared between a network of possibly dishonest parties. This has implications in certifying the application of graph states for various distributed tasks. We present a protocol which is globally efficient for a large family of useful graph states, including cluster states, GHZ states, cycle graph states and more. For general graph states, efficiency with respect to the security parameter is maintained, though there is a cost increase with the size of the graph state. The protocols are practical, requiring only multiple copies of the graph state, local measurements and classical communication.

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arXiv2022

Cryptographic approach to Quantum Metrology

We consider a cryptographically motivated framework for quantum metrology in the presence of a malicious adversary. We begin by devising an estimation strategy for a (potentially) altered resource (due to a malicious adversary) and quantify the amount of bias and the loss in precision as a function of the introduced uncertainty in the resource. By incorporating an appropriate cryptographic protocol, the uncertainty in the resource can be bounded with respect to the soundness of the cryptographic protocol. Thus the effectiveness of the quantum metrology problem can be directly related to the effectiveness of the cryptography protocol. As an example, we consider a quantum metrology problem in which resources are exchanged through an unsecured quantum channel. We then construct two protocols for this task which offer a trade-off between difficulty of implementation and efficiency.

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arXiv2021

Robust quantum metrology with explicit symmetric states

Quantum metrology is a promising practical use case for quantum technologies, where physical quantities can be measured with unprecedented precision. In lieu of quantum error correction procedures, near term quantum devices are expected to be noisy, and we have to make do with noisy probe states. We prove that, for a set of carefully chosen symmetric probe states that lie within certain quantum error correction codes, quantum metrology exhibits an advantage over classical metrology even after the probe states are corrupted by a constant number of erasure and dephasing errors. These probe states prove useful for robust metrology not only in the NISQ regime, but also in the asymptotic setting where they achieve Heisenberg scaling. This brings us closer towards making robust quantum metrology a technological reality.

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arXiv2021

Efficient verification of Boson Sampling

The demonstration of quantum speedup, also known as quantum computational supremacy, that is the ability of quantum computers to outperform dramatically their classical counterparts, is an important milestone in the field of quantum computing. While quantum speedup experiments are gradually escaping the regime of classical simulation, they still lack efficient verification protocols and rely on partial validation. Here we derive an efficient protocol for verifying with single-mode Gaussian measurements the output states of a large class of continuous-variable quantum circuits demonstrating quantum speedup, including Boson Sampling experiments, thus enabling a convincing demonstration of quantum speedup with photonic computing. Beyond the quantum speedup milestone, our results also enable the efficient and reliable certification of a large class of intractable continuous-variable multimode quantum states.

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arXiv2021

Outcome determinism in measurement-based quantum computation with qudits

In measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC), computation is carried out by a sequence of measurements and corrections on an entangled state. Flow, and related concepts, are powerful techniques for characterising the dependence of the corrections on previous measurement outcomes. We introduce flow-based methods for MBQC with qudit graph states, which we call Zd-flow, when the local dimension is an odd prime. Our main results are proofs that Zd-flow is a necessary and sufficient condition for a strong form of outcome determinism. Along the way, we find a suitable generalisation of the concept of measurement planes to this setting and characterise the allowed measurements in a qudit MBQC. We also provide a polynomial-time algorithm for finding an optimal Zd-flow whenever one exists.

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arXiv2021

Quantum machine learning with adaptive linear optics

We study supervised learning algorithms in which a quantum device is used to perform a computational subroutine - either for prediction via probability estimation, or to compute a kernel via estimation of quantum states overlap. We design implementations of these quantum subroutines using Boson Sampling architectures in linear optics, supplemented by adaptive measurements. We then challenge these quantum algorithms by deriving classical simulation algorithms for the tasks of output probability estimation and overlap estimation. We obtain different classical simulability regimes for these two computational tasks in terms of the number of adaptive measurements and input photons. In both cases, our results set explicit limits to the range of parameters for which a quantum advantage can be envisaged with adaptive linear optics compared to classical machine learning algorithms: we show that the number of input photons and the number of adaptive measurements cannot be simultaneously small compared to the number of modes. Interestingly, our analysis leaves open the possibility of a near-term quantum advantage with a single adaptive measurement.

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arXiv2021

Certifying dimension of quantum systems by sequential projective measurements

This work analyzes correlations arising from quantum systems subject to sequential projective measurements to certify that the system in question has a quantum dimension greater than some $d$. We refine previous known methods and show that dimension greater than two can be certified in scenarios which are considerably simpler than the ones presented before and, for the first time in this sequential projective scenario, we certify quantum systems with dimension strictly greater than three. We also perform a systematic numerical analysis in terms of robustness and conclude that performing random projective measurements on random pure qutrit states allows a robust certification of quantum dimensions with very high probability.

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arXiv2021

Practical Limits of Error Correction for Quantum Metrology

Noise is the greatest obstacle in quantum metrology that limits it achievable precision and sensitivity. There are many techniques to mitigate the effect of noise, but this can never be done completely. One commonly proposed technique is to repeatedly apply quantum error correction. Unfortunately, the required repetition frequency needed to recover the Heisenberg limit is unachievable with the existing quantum technologies. In this article we explore the discrete application of quantum error correction with current technological limitations in mind. We establish that quantum error correction can be beneficial and highlight the factors which need to be improved so one can reliably reach the Heisenberg limit level precision.

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