arXiv subjects

Jean-Daniel Bancal

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-Daniel Bancal.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Device-independent point estimation from finite data and its application to device-independent property estimation

The device-independent approach to physics is one where conclusions are drawn directly from the observed correlations between measurement outcomes. In quantum information, this approach allows one to make strong statements about the properties of the underlying systems or devices solely via the observation of Bell-inequality-violating correlations. However, since one can only perform a {\em finite number} of experimental trials, statistical fluctuations necessarily accompany any estimation of these correlations. Consequently, an important gap remains between the many theoretical tools developed for the asymptotic scenario and the experimentally obtained raw data. In particular, a physical and concurrently practical way to estimate the underlying quantum distribution has so far remained elusive. Here, we show that the natural analogs of the maximum-likelihood estimation technique and the least-square-error estimation technique in the device-independent context result in point estimates of the true distribution that are physical, unique, computationally tractable and consistent. They thus serve as sound algorithmic tools allowing one to bridge the aforementioned gap. As an application, we demonstrate how such estimates of the underlying quantum distribution can be used to provide, in certain cases, trustworthy estimates of the amount of entanglement present in the measured system. In stark contrast to existing approaches to device-independent parameter estimations, our estimation does not require the prior knowledge of {\em any} Bell inequality tailored for the specific property and the specific distribution of interest.

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arXiv2018

Bell correlations depth in many-body systems

While the interest in multipartite nonlocality has grown in recent years, its existence in large quantum systems is difficult to confirm experimentally. This is mostly due to the inadequacy of standard multipartite Bell inequalities to many-body systems: such inequalities usually rely on expectation values involving many parties and require an individual addressing of each party. In a recent work [J. Tura et al. Science 344, 6189 (2014)] some of us proposed simpler Bell inequalities overcoming such difficulties, opening the way for the detection of Bell correlations with trusted collective measurements through Bell correlation witnesses [R. Schmied et al. Science 352, 441 (2016)], hence demonstrating the presence of Bell correlations with assumptions on the statistics. Here, we address the question of assessing the number of particles sharing genuinely nonlocal correlations in a multipartite system. This endeavour is a priori challenging, as known Bell inequalities for genuine nonlocality suffer from the above shortcomings, plus a number of measurement settings scaling exponentially with the system size. We first show that most of these constraints drop once the witnesses corresponding to these inequalities are expressed: in systems where multipartite expectation values can be evaluated, these witnesses can reveal genuine nonlocality for an arbitrary number of particles with just two collective measurements. We then introduce a general framework focused on two-body Bell-like inequalities. We show that they also provide information about the number of particles that are genuinely nonlocal. Then, we characterize all such inequalities for a finite system size. We provide witnesses of Bell correlation depth $k\leq6$ for any number of parties, within experimental reach. A violation for depth $6$ is achieved with existing data from an ensemble of 480 atoms.

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arXiv2017

Many-box locality

There is an ongoing search for a physical or operational definition for quantum mechanics. Several informational principles have been proposed which are satisfied by a theory less restrictive than quantum mechanics. Here, we introduce the principle of "many-box locality", which is a refined version of the previously proposed "macroscopic locality". These principles are based on coarse-graining the statistics of several copies of a given box. The set of behaviors satisfying many-box locality for $N$ boxes is denoted $MBL_N$. We study these sets in the bipartite scenario with two binary measurements, in relation with the sets $\mathcal{Q}$ and $\mathcal{Q}_{1+AB}$ of quantum and "almost quantum" correlations. We find that the $MBL_N$ sets are in general not convex. For unbiased marginals, by working in the Fourier space we can prove analytically that $MBL_{N}\subsetneq\mathcal{Q}$ for any finite $N$, while $MBL_{\infty}=\mathcal{Q}$. Then, with suitably developed numerical tools, we find an example of a point that belongs to $MBL_{16}$ but not to $\mathcal{Q}_{1+AB}$. Among the problems that remain open, is whether $\mathcal{Q}\subset MBL_{\infty}$.

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arXiv2017

Witnessing irreducible dimension

The Hilbert space dimension of a quantum system is the most basic quantifier of its information content. Lower bounds on the dimension can be certified in a device-independent way, based only on observed statistics. We highlight that some such "dimension witnesses" capture only the presence of systems of some dimension, which in a sense is trivial, not the capacity of performing information processing on them, which is the point of experimental efforts to control high-dimensional systems. In order to capture this aspect, we introduce the notion of irreducible dimension of a quantum behaviour. This dimension can be certified, and we provide a witness for irreducible dimension four.

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arXiv2017

Experimental many-pairs nonlocality

Collective measurements on large quantum systems together with a majority voting strategy can lead to a violation of the CHSH Bell inequality. In presence of many entangled pairs, this violation decreases quickly with the number of pairs, and vanishes for some critical pair number that is a function of the noise present in the system. Here, we show that a different binning strategy can lead to a more substantial Bell violation when the noise is sufficiently small. Given the relation between the critical pair number and the source noise, we then present an experiment where the critical pair number is used to quantify the quality of a high visibility photon pair source. Our results demonstrate nonlocal correlations using collective measurements operating on clusters of more than 40 photon pairs.

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arXiv2017

Optimal entanglement witnesses in a split spin-squeezed Bose-Einstein condensate

How to detect quantum correlations in bi-partite scenarios using a split many-body system and collective measurements on each party? We address this question by deriving entanglement witnesses using either only first or first and second order moments of local collective spin components. In both cases, we derive optimal witnesses for spatially split spin squeezed states in the presence of local white noise. We then compare the two optimal witnesses with respect to their resistance to various noise sources operating either at the preparation or at the detection level. We finally evaluate the statistics required to estimate the value of these witnesses when measuring a split spin-squeezed Bose-Einstein condensate. Our results can be seen as a step towards Bell tests with many-body systems.

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arXiv2017

Bell correlations in a many-body system with finite statistics

A recent experiment reported the first violation of a Bell correlation witness in a many-body system [Science 352, 441 (2016)]. Following discussions in this paper, we address here the question of the statistics required to witness Bell correlated states, i.e. states violating a Bell inequality, in such experiments. We start by deriving multipartite Bell inequalities involving an arbitrary number of measurement settings, two outcomes per party and one- and two-body correlators only. Based on these inequalities, we then build up improved witnesses able to detect Bell-correlated states in many-body systems using two collective measurements only. These witnesses can potentially detect Bell correlations in states with an arbitrarily low amount of spin squeezing. We then establish an upper bound on the statistics needed to convincingly conclude that a measured state is Bell-correlated.

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arXiv2016

A new device-independent dimension witness and its experimental implementation

A dimension witness is a criterion that sets a lower bound on the dimension needed to reproduce the observed data. Three types of dimension witnesses can be found in the literature: device-dependent ones, in which the bound is obtained assuming some knowledge on the state and the measurements; device-independent prepare-and-measure ones, that can be applied to any system including classical ones; and device-independent Bell-based ones, that certify the minimal dimension of some entangled systems. Here we consider the Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu (CGLMP) Bell-type inequality for four outcomes. We show that a sufficiently high violation of this inequality witnesses $d \geq 4$ and present a proof-of-principle experimental observation of such a violation. This presents a first experimental violation of the third type of dimension witness beyond qutrits.

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arXiv2016

Measurement-device-independent quantification of entanglement for given Hilbert space dimension

We address the question of how much entanglement can be certified from the observed correlations and the knowledge of the Hilbert space dimension of the measured systems. We focus on the case in which both systems are known to be qubits. For several correlations (though not for all), one can certify the same amount of entanglement as with state tomography, but with fewer assumptions, since nothing is assumed about the measurements. We also present security proofs of quantum key distribution without any assumption on the measurements. We discuss how both the amount of entanglement and the security of quantum key distribution (QKD) are affected by the inefficiency of detectors in this scenario.

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arXiv2016

Bell Correlations in a Bose-Einstein Condensate

Characterizing many-body systems through the quantum correlations between their constituent particles is a major goal of quantum physics. Although entanglement is routinely observed in many systems, we report here the detection of stronger correlations - Bell correlations - between the spins of about 480 atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We derive a Bell correlation witness from a many-particle Bell inequality involving only one- and two-body correlation functions. Our measurement on a spin-squeezed state exceeds the threshold for Bell correlations by 3.8 standard deviations. Our work shows that the strongest possible non-classical correlations are experimentally accessible in many-body systems, and that they can be revealed by collective measurements.

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arXiv2016

Looking for symmetric Bell inequalities

Finding all Bell inequalities for a given number of parties, measurement settings, and measurement outcomes is in general a computationally hard task. We show that all Bell inequalities which are symmetric under the exchange of parties can be found by examining a symmetrized polytope which is simpler than the full Bell polytope. As an illustration of our method, we generate 238885 new Bell inequalities and 1085 new Svetlichny inequalities. We find, in particular, facet inequalities for Bell experiments involving two parties and two measurement settings that are not of the Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu type.

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arXiv2016

Randomness in post-selected events

Bell inequality violations can be used to certify private randomness for use in cryptographic applications. In photonic Bell experiments, a large amount of the data that is generated comes from no-detection events and presumably contains little randomness. This raises the question as to whether randomness can be extracted only from the smaller post-selected subset corresponding to proper detection events, instead of from the entire set of data. This could in principle be feasible without opening an analogue of the detection loophole as long as the min-entropy of the post-selected data is evaluated by taking all the information into account, including no-detection events. The possibility of extracting randomness from a short string has a practical advantage, because it reduces the computational time of the extraction. Here, we investigate the above idea in a simple scenario, where the devices and the adversary behave according to i.i.d. strategies. We show that indeed almost all the randomness is present in the pair of outcomes for which at least one detection happened. We further show that in some cases applying a pre-processing on the data can capture features that an analysis based on global frequencies only misses, thus resulting in the certification of more randomness. We then briefly consider non-i.i.d strategies and provide an explicit example of such a strategy that is more powerful than any i.i.d. one even in the asymptotic limit of infinitely many measurement rounds, something that was not reported before in the context of Bell inequalities.

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arXiv2016

Certified Randomness from a Two-Level System in a Relativistic Quantum Field

Randomness is an indispensable resource in modern science and information technology. Fortunately, an experimentally simple procedure exists to generate randomness with well-characterized devices: measuring a quantum system in a basis complementary to its preparation. Towards realizing this goal one may consider using atoms or superconducting qubits, promising candidates for quantum information processing. However, their unavoidable interaction with the electromagnetic field affects their dynamics. At large time scales, this can result in decoherence. Smaller time scales in principle avoid this problem, but may not be well analysed under the usual rotating wave and single-mode approximation (RWA and SMA) which break the relativistic nature of quantum field theory. Here, we use a fully relativistic analysis to quantify the information that an adversary with access to the field could get on the result of an atomic measurement. Surprisingly, we find that the adversary's guessing probability is not minimized for atoms initially prepared in the ground state (an intuition derived from the RWA and SMA model).

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arXiv2016

Device-independent parallel self-testing of two singlets

Device-independent self-testing is the possibility of certifying the quantum state and the measurements, up to local isometries, using only the statistics observed by querying uncharacterized local devices. In this paper, we study parallel self-testing of two maximally entangled pairs of qubits: in particular, the local tensor product structure is not assumed but derived. We prove two criteria that achieve the desired result: a double use of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality and the $3\times 3$ Magic Square game. This demonstrate that the magic square game can only be perfectly won by measureing a two-singlets state. The tolerance to noise is well within reach of state-of-the-art experiments.

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arXiv2015

Physical characterization of quantum devices from nonlocal correlations

In the device-independent approach to quantum information theory, quantum systems are regarded as black boxes which, given an input (the measurement setting), return an output (the measurement result). These boxes are then treated regardless of their actual internal working. In this paper, we develop SWAP, a theoretical concept which, in combination with the tool of semi-definite methods for the characterization of quantum correlations, allows us to estimate physical properties of the black boxes from the observed measurement statistics. We find that the SWAP tool provides bounds orders of magnitude better than previously-known techniques (e.g.: for a CHSH violation larger than 2.57, SWAP predicts a singlet fidelity greater than 70%). This method also allows us to deal with hitherto intractable cases such as robust device-independent self-testing of non-maximally entangled two-qutrit states in the CGLMP scenario (for which Jordan's Lemma does not apply) and the device-independent certification of entangled measurements. We further apply the SWAP method to relate nonlocal correlations to work extraction and quantum dimensionality, hence demonstrating that this tool can be used to study a wide variety of properties relying on the sole knowledge of accessible statistics.

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arXiv2014

More randomness from noisy sources

Bell experiments can be used to generate private random numbers. An ideal Bell experiment would involve measuring a state of two maximally entangled qubits, but in practice any state produced is subject to noise. Here we consider how the techniques presented in arXiv:1309.3894 and arXiv:1309.3930, i.e. using an optimized Bell inequality, and taking advantage of the fact that the device provider is not our adversary, can be used to improve the rate of randomness generation in Bell-like tests performed on singlet states subject to either white or dephasing noise.

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arXiv2014

Witnessing single-photon entanglement with local homodyne measurements: analytical bounds and robustness to losses

Single-photon entanglement is one of the primary resources for quantum networks, including quantum repeater architectures. Such entanglement can be revealed with only local homodyne measurements through the entanglement witness presented in [Morin et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 130401 (2013)]. Here, we provide an extended analysis of this witness by introducing analytical bounds and by reporting measurements confirming its great robustness with regard to losses. This study highlights the potential of optical hybrid methods, where discrete entanglement is characterized through continuous-variable measurements.

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arXiv2014

Quantum randomness extraction for various levels of characterization of the devices

The amount of intrinsic randomness that can be extracted from measurement on quantum systems depends on several factors: notably, the power given to the adversary and the level of characterization of the devices of the authorized partners. After presenting a systematic introduction to these notions, in this paper we work in the class of least adversarial power, which is relevant for assessing setups operated by trusted experimentalists, and compare three levels of characterization of the devices. Many recent studies have focused on the so-called "device-independent" level, in which a lower bound on the amount of intrinsic randomness can be certified without any characterization. The other extreme is the case when all the devices are fully characterized: this "tomographic" level has been known for a long time. We present for this case a systematic and efficient approach to quantifying the amount of intrinsic randomness, and show that setups involving ancillas (POVMs, pointer measurements) may not be interesting here, insofar as one may extract randomness from the ancilla rather than from the system under study. Finally, we study how much randomness can be obtained in presence of an intermediate level of characterization related to the task of "steering", in which Bob's device is fully characterized while Alice's is a black box. We obtain our results here by adapting the NPA hierarchy of semidefinite programs to the steering scenario.

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