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He Lu

Publications and source records attributed to He Lu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Measurement-Device-Independent Entanglement Quantification in a Fully Connected Time-Bin Quantum Network

Fully connected quantum networks enable scalable quantum communication, yet reliable entanglement characterization without trusting measurement devices remains challenging. Here we experimentally demonstrate measurement-device-independent (MDI) entanglement verification and quantification in a time-bin-encoded fully connected quantum network. Using a broadband periodically poled lithium niobate on insulator source combined with dense wavelength-division multiplexing, we distribute all six pairwise entangled links among four users over 20-km fiber channels, preserving high-fidelity entanglement without active stabilization of the long-distance fiber links. We show that conventional entanglement witnesses can fail under untrusted measurement conditions. By encoding trusted input states in the polarization degree of freedom of the same photons, we realize MDI measurements without ancillary photons or additional experimental resources. Both entanglement verification and quantification are obtained from the same measurement dataset. Our results establish a practical and scalable approach for reliable entanglement characterization in quantum networks.

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Chip-Integrated Broadband Multi-Photon Source for Wavelength-Multiplexed Quantum Networks

Quantum networks based on wavelength-multiplexed entanglement enable parallel distribution of quantum correlations, increasing channel capacity for secure communication and distributed quantum information processing. However, broadband integrated sources capable of generating multipartite entanglement beyond photon pairs remain scarce. Here we report on-chip generation of telecom-band four-photon entanglement in a periodically poled thin-film lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) waveguide. Type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion provides a phase-matching bandwidth exceeding 200 nm, enabling spectrally separable generation of multi-photon entanglement across the telecom band. The generated photons are encoded in time bins for robust fiber compatibility, and a coherent interface enabling reversible conversion between time-bin and polarization degrees of freedom allows complete quantum state tomography. We measure two-photon entanglement with a brightness of 6.7 MHz/mW/nm and a fidelity of $0.874 \pm 0.002$. At a pump power of 0.08 mW, the four-photon state exhibits a fourfold coincidence rate of 1 Hz and a fidelity of $0.74 \pm 0.01$, representing a threefold improvement over previous integrated platforms. Our results establish LNOI as a scalable platform for broadband multi-photon entanglement and provide a practical route toward dense wavelength-multiplexed quantum networks.

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Experimental High-Accuracy and Broadband Quantum Frequency Sensing via Geodesic Control

Accurate frequency estimation of oscillating signals over a broad bandwidth is a central task in quantum sensing, yet it is often compromised by spurious responses to higher-order harmonics in realistic multi-frequency environments. Here we experimentally demonstrate a high-accuracy and broadband quantum frequency sensing protocol based on geodesic control, implemented using the electron spin of a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. By engineering an intrinsically single-frequency response, geodesic control enables bias-free frequency estimation with strong suppression of harmonic-induced systematic errors across a wide spectral range spanning from the megahertz to the gigahertz regime. Furthermore, by incorporating synchronized readout, we achieve millihertz-level frequency resolution under noisy signal conditions. Our results provide systematic experimental benchmarking of geodesic control for quantum frequency sensing and establish it as a practical approach for high-accuracy metrology in realistic environments.

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Floquet Diamond Sensor with Optimal Precision

The diamond sensor has emerged as a promising platform for quantum sensing, enabling the estimation of physical quantities -- such as microwave~(MW) field -- with precision unattainable by classical counterpart. However, traditional diamond sensors suffer severe precision degradation when the signal MW is not resonant with the sensor transition frequency. Here, we propose and demonstrate a Floquet diamond sensor~(FDS) for high-precision off-resonant MW amplitude sensing without attenuating the strength of the signal MW. The periodic driven field effectively induces an quasi-energy shift that matches the off-resonant MW frequency. The measurement precision of FDS is characterized by quantum Fisher information, which approaches the ultimate precision -- Heisenberg limit -- within the coherent time. Furthermore, the FDS exhibits robust tolerance to practical control errors and is compatible with dynamical coupling protocol, enabling a robust and high-sensitivity magnetic sensing. Our results confirm the quantum advantage of quantum sensing and provide a practical technology for high-precision off-resonant MW sensing.

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Broadband Quantum Photon Source in Step-Chirped Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate Waveguide

Broadband nonlinear optical devices play a critical role in both classical and quantum optics. Here, we design and fabricate a 6.82-mm-long step-chirped periodically poled lithium niobate~(CPPLN) waveguide on lithium niobate on insulator, which enables quasi-phase matching over a broad bandwidth for second-harmonic generation~(SHG) and spontaneous parametric down-conversion~(SPDC). The SHG achieves an average efficiency of 54.4\%/W/cm$^2$ over the first-harmonic wavelength range of 1510~nm-1620~nm, paving the way for realizing SPDC across a wide range of pump wavelengths. For SPDC, by tuning the pump wavelength to 775~nm, 780~nm, and 785~nm, we achieve broadband photon-pair generation with a maximum full bandwidth and brightness up to 99~THz~(846~nm) and 20~GHz/mW/nm, respectively. Our findings provide an efficient and experiment-friendly approach for generating broadband photon pairs, which holds significant promise for advancing applications in quantum metrology.

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Compact non-degenerate entangled-photon source and near-infrared-to-telecom quantum teleportation

The polarization-entangled photon source (PEPS) at non-degenerated wavelengths is pivotal to connect quantum systems working at different wavelengths, with the assistance of quantum teleportation. Here, a compact Sagnac-type photon source is designed and demonstrated, in which two photons with wavelengths at 810 and 1550~nm are highly entangled in polarization degree of freedom. The two photons are generated from a periodically poled lithium niobate crystal pumped with a 532~nm continuous-wave laser, via type-0 nondegenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The polarization of three lights is rotated by a single periscope, which makes the Sagnac interferometer compact and stable. The generated two photons are with high brightness of $3\times10^4$ pairs/s/mW, which are highly entangled with fidelity of $0.985\pm0.002$. The entanglement is verified by violating the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality with $\mathcal S =2.756\pm0.007$. Finally, teleportation is demonstrated with this nondegenerate source, in which photonic states at 810~nm is teleported to 1550~nm with fidelity of $0.955\pm0.003$.

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Multiple-Noise-Resilient Nonadiabatic Geometric Quantum Control of Solid-State Spins in Diamond

Reliable and robust control lies at the core of implementing quantum information processing with diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. However, control pulses inevitably introduce multiple errors, leading to decoherence and hindering scalable applications. Here, we experimentally report an experiment-friendly multiple-noise-resilient nonadiabatic geometric quantum gate~(MNR-NGQG) that can significantly improve conventional dynamical gate in both robustness and coherence. Notably, even when the detuning fluctuation range is comparable to the maximum Rabi frequency, the single-qubit gate performance of the MNR-NGQG remains almost unchanged. Besides, the coherence time of the electron spin is significantly extended to 690 $\pm$ 30 $ \mu$s, 3.5 times that of the naive dynamical counterpart. As a result, the fidelity of single-qubit gates reaches 0.9992(1), as characterized by quantum process tomography. With its experimentally feasible design and relaxed hardware requirements, our work offers a solid paradigm for achieving high-fidelity quantum control in NV center system, paving the way for practical applications in quantum information science.

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Two repeated quasi-periodic oscillations in the FSRQ S5 1044+71 observed by TESS

In this work, we report for the first time two repeated quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in the light curve of the Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar (FSRQ) S5 1044+71. This source was observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in multiple sectors. We used the generalized Lomb-Scargle periodogram method and weighted wavelet Z-transform method to search for significant periodic signals. The main results are as follows: We found QPOs of $\sim$ 7.0 days (persisted for 4 cycles, with a significance of $\sim3.5\sigma$) and $\sim$ 7.3 days (persisted for 5 cycles, with a significance of $\sim3.8\sigma$) in the light curves of Sector 47 and EP1, respectively. Considering range of error, we consider them to be the same. We discussed two likely models of these rapid quasi-periodic variations: One comes from the jet and the other from the accretion disk. For the first one, we consider kink instability of the jet as a plausible explanation. Second, the QPO is probable to come from the main hot spots in the accretion disk, which is located approximately within the innermost stable circular orbit allowed by general relativity. Based on this model, we estimate the mass of the black hole in S5 1044+71 to be $3.49 \times 10^9 M_{\odot}$.

astro-ph.HE

Experimental Acceleration of Spin Transition in Nitrogen-Vacancy Center

Shortcuts to adiabaticity~(STA) enables fast and robust coherent control of quantum system, which has been well placed in quantum technologies. In particular, inverse engineering STA provides much more freedom for the optimization of shortcut, which alleviates the complexity for experimental realization. Here, we implement a STA technique, known as invariant-based inverse engineering, to speed up the adiabatic control of the electron triplet ground state of a single nitrogen-vacancy~(NV) center. The microwave pulses to drive inversely engineered STA are obtained with space curve quantum control, where the evolution of spin transition is mapped to a three-dimensional closed space curve and the design of shortcut is obtained by optimization over the space curve. We demonstrate the fast and high-fidelity drive of dipole-forbidden transition between two spin sublevels of the ground state. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness of the spin transition by introducing the detuning of driving microwave field. The acceleration and robustness is further confirmed by the comparison with two traditional Raman control schemes. Our results suggest invariant-based inverse engineering is powerful for fast and robust manipulation of NV system, and thus benefits quantum sensing and quantum computation based on the NV platform.

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Wavelength-Tunable and High-Heralding-Efficiency Quantum Photon Source in Birefringent Phase-Matched Lithium Niobate Waveguide

Lithium niobate~(LN) is a birefringent material, where the strong birefringence thermo-optic effect is promising for the generation of quantum photon source with widely tunable wavelength. Here, we demonstrate birefringent phase-matching in a 20-mm-long waveguide fabricated on 5~$\mu$m-thick x-cut lithium niobate on insulator. The waveguide is deviated from the optical axis of LN by an angle of 53.5$^\circ$, enabling the phase matching between telecom and visible wavelengths. The phase-matching wavelength of this device can be thermally tuned with rate of 0.617~nm/K. We demonstrate the type-1 spontaneous parametric down-conversion to generate photon pairs with brightness of 2.2~MHz/mW and coincidence-to-accidental ratio up to $2.8\times10^5$. Furthermore, the heralded single photon is obtained from the photon pair with efficiency of 13.8\% and count rate up to 37.8~kHz.

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High-efficiency On-chip Quantum Photon Source in Modal Phase-matched Lithium Niobate Nanowaveguide

Thin-film lithium niobate on insulator~(LNOI) emerges as a promising platform for integrated quantum photon source, enabling scalable on-chip quantum information processing. The most popular technique to overcome the phase mismatching between interacting waves in waveguide is periodic poling, which is intrinsically sensitive to poling uniformity. Here, we report an alternative strategy to offset the phase mismatching of spontaneous parametric down-conversion~(SPDC) process, so-called modal phase matching, in a straight waveguide fabricated on a dual-layer LNOI. The dual-layer LNOI consists of two 300~nm lithium niobates with opposite directions, which significantly enhances the spatial overlap between fundamental and high-order modes and thus enables efficient SPDC. This dual-layer waveguide generates photon pairs with pair generation rate of 41.77~GHz/mW, which exhibits excellent signal-to-noise performance with coincidence-to-accidental ratio up to 58298$\pm$1297. Moreover, we observe a heralded single-photon source with second-order autocorrelation $g_{H}^{(2)}(0)<0.2$ and heralded rate exceeding 100~kHz. Our results provide an experiment-friendly approach for efficient generation of quantum photon sources and benefit the on-chip quantum information processing based on LNOI.

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Experimental single-copy distillation of quantumness from higher-dimensional entanglement

Entanglement is at the heart of quantum theory and is responsible for various quantum-enabling technologies. In practice, during its preparation, storage, and distribution to the intended recipients, this valuable quantum resource may suffer from noisy interactions that reduce its usefulness for the desired information-processing tasks. Conventional schemes of entanglement distillation aim to alleviate this problem by performing collective operations on multiple copies of these decohered states and sacrificing some of them to recover Bell pairs. However, for this scheme to work, the states to be distilled should already contain a large enough fraction of maximally entangled states before these collective operations. Not all entangled quantum states meet this premise. Here, by using the paradigmatic family of two-qutrit Werner states as an exemplifying example, we experimentally demonstrate how one may use single-copy local filtering operations to meet this requirement and to recover the quantumness hidden in these higher-dimensional states. Among others, our results provide the first proof-of-principle experimental certification of the Bell-nonlocal properties of these intriguing entangled states, the activation of their usefulness for quantum teleportation, dense coding, and an enhancement of their quantum steerability, and hence usefulness for certain discrimination tasks. Our theoretically established lower bounds on the steering robustness of these states, when they admit a symmetric quasiextension or a bosonic symmetric extension, and when they show hidden dense-codability may also be of independent interest.

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Efficient generation of broadband photon pairs in shallow-etched lithium niobate nanowaveguide

We design and fabricate shallow-etched periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide to realize highly-efficient broadband spontaneous parametric down-conversion~(SPDC) on nanophotonic chip. The shallow-etched waveguide is capable to tolerate the non-uniformities of waveguide width induced by fabrication imperfections, enabling generation of photon pairs with high count rate and bandwidth. We demonstrate photon-pair generation with a high brightness of 11.7~GHz/mW and bandwidth of 22~THz, in a 5.7-mm-long PPLN waveguide. The generated photon pairs exhibit strong temporal correlation with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio up to 16262$\pm$850. Our results confirm the feasibility of shallow etching in fabrication of efficient SPDC device on platform of lithium niobate on insulator, and benefit quantum information processing with broadband photon source.

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Experimental Hybrid Shadow Tomography and Distillation

Characterization of quantum states is a fundamental requirement in quantum science and technology. As a promising framework, shadow tomography shows significant efficiency in estimating linear functions, however, for the challenging nonlinear ones, it requires measurements at an exponential cost. Here, we implement an advanced shadow protocol, so-called hybrid shadow~(HS) tomography, to reduce the measurement cost in the estimation of nonlinear functions in an optical system. We design and realize a deterministic quantum Fredkin gate with single photon, achieving high process fidelity of $0.935\pm0.001$. Utilizing this novel Fredkin gate, we demonstrate HS in the estimations, like the higher-order moments up to 4, and reveal that the sample complexity of HS is significantly reduced compared with the original shadow protocol. Furthermore, we utilize these higher-degree functions to implement virtual distillation, which effectively extracts a high-purity quantum state from two noisy copies. The virtual distillation is also verified in a proof-of-principle demonstration of quantum metrology, further enhancing the accuracy of parameter estimation. Our results suggest that HS is efficient in state characterization and promising for quantum technologies.

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Experimental virtual distillation of entanglement and coherence

Noise is in general inevitable and detrimental to practical and useful quantum communication and computation. Under the resource theory framework, resource distillation serves as a generic tool to overcome the effect of noise. Yet, conventional resource distillation protocols generally require operations on multi-copies of resource states, and strong limitations exist that restrict their practical utilities. Recently, by relaxing the setting of resource distillation to only approximating the measurement statistics instead of the quantum state, a resource-frugal protocol, virtual resource distillation, is proposed, which allows more effective distillation of noisy resources. Here, we report its experimental implementation on a photonic quantum system for the distillation of quantum coherence (up to dimension 4) and bipartite entanglement. We show the virtual distillation of the maximal superposed state of dimension four from the state of dimension two, an impossible task in conventional coherence distillation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the virtual distillation of entanglement with operations acting only on a single copy of the noisy EPR pair and showcase the quantum teleportation task using the virtually distilled EPR pair with a significantly improved fidelity of the teleported state. These results illustrate the feasibility of the virtual resource distillation method and pave the way for accurate manipulation of quantum resources with noisy quantum hardware.

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Experimental distillation of tripartite quantum steering with an optimal local filtering operation

Multipartite Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen~(EPR) steering admits multipartite entanglement in the presence of uncharacterized verifiers, enabling practical applications in semi-device-independent protocols. Such applications generally require stronger steerability, while the unavoidable noise weakens steerability and consequently degrades the performance of quantum information processing. Here, we propose the local filtering operation that can maximally distill genuine tripartite EPR steering from $N$ copies of three-qubit generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, in the context of two semi-device-independent scenarios. The optimal filtering operation is determined by the maximization of assemblage fidelity. Analytical and numerical results indicate the advantage of proposed filtering operation when $N$ is finite and the steerability of initial assemblages is weak. Experimentally, a proof-of-principle demonstration of two-copy distillation is realized with optical system. The advantage of optimal local filtering operation is confirmed by the distilled assemblage in terms of higher assemblage fidelity with perfectly genuine tripartite steerable assemblages, as well as the greater violation of the inequality to witness genuine tripartite steerable assemblages. Our results benefit the distillation of multipartite EPR steering in practice, where the number of copies of initial assemblages is generally finite.

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Efficient Characterizations of Multiphoton States with an Ultra-thin Optical Device

Metasurface enables the generation and manipulation of multiphoton entanglement with flat optics, providing a more efficient platform for large-scale photonic quantum information processing. Here, we show that a single metasurface optical device would allow more efficient characterizations of multiphoton entangled states, such as shadow tomography, which generally requires fast and complicated control of optical setups to perform information-complete measurements, a demanding task using conventional optics. The compact and stable device here allows implementations of general positive observable value measures with a reduced sample complexity and significantly alleviates the experimental complexity to implement shadow tomography. Integrating self-learning and calibration algorithms, we observe notable advantages in the reconstruction of multiphoton entanglement, including using fewer measurements, having higher accuracy, and being robust against experimental imperfections. Our work unveils the feasibility of metasurface as a favorable integrated optical device for efficient characterization of multiphoton entanglement, and sheds light on scalable photonic quantum technologies with ultra-thin optical devices.

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Quantification of Entanglement and Coherence with Purity Detection

Entanglement and coherence are fundamental properties of quantum systems, promising to power near future quantum technologies, such as quantum computation, quantum communication and quantum metrology. Yet, their quantification, rather than mere detection, generally requires reconstructing the spectrum of quantum states, i.e., experimentally challenging measurement sets that increase exponentially with the system size. Here, we demonstrate quantitative bounds to operationally useful entanglement and coherence that are universally valid, analytically computable, and experimentally friendly. Specifically, our main theoretical results are lower and upper bounds to the coherent information and the relative entropy of coherence in terms of local and global purities of quantum states. To validate our proposal, we experimentally implement two purity detection methods in an optical system: shadow estimation with random measurements and collective measurements on pairs of state copies. The experiment shows that both the coherent information and the relative entropy of coherence of pure and mixed unknown quantum states can be bounded by purity functions. Our research offers an efficient means of verifying large-scale quantum information processing.

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