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Marco Piani

Publications and source records attributed to Marco Piani.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2019

Monogamy relations of quantum coherence between multiple subspaces

Quantum coherence plays an important role in quantum information protocols that provide an advantage over classical information processing. The amount of coherence that can exist between two orthogonal subspaces is limited by the positivity constraint on the density matrix. On the level of multipartite systems, this gives rise to what is known as monogamy of entanglement. On the level of single systems this leads to a bound, and hence, a trade-off in coherence that can exist between different orthogonal subspaces. In this work we derive trade-off relations for the amount of coherence that can be shared between a given subspace and all other subspaces based on trace norm, Hilbert-Schmidt norm and von Neumann relative entropy. From this we derive criteria detecting genuine multisubspace coherence.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2018

Complete extension: the non-signaling analog of quantum purification

Deriving quantum mechanics from information-theoretic postulates is a recent research direction taken, in part, with the view of finding a beyond-quantum theory; once the postulates are clear, we can consider modifications to them. A key postulate is the purification postulate, which we propose to replace by a more generally applicable postulate that we call the complete extension postulate (CEP), i.e., the existence of an extension of a physical system from which one can generate any other extension. This new concept leads to a plethora of open questions and research directions in the study of general theories satisfying the CEP (which may include a theory that hyper-decoheres to quantum theory). For example, we show that the CEP implies the impossibility of bit-commitment. This is exemplified by a case study of the theory of non-signalling behaviors which we show satisfies the CEP. We moreover show that in certain cases the complete extension will not be pure, highlighting the key divergence from the purification postulate.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2018

Simulating the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of local observables by trading entanglement for mixture

The fact that the computational cost of simulating a many-body quantum system on a computer increases with the amount of entanglement has been considered as the major bottleneck for simulating its out-of-equilibrium dynamics. Some aspects of the dynamics are, nevertheless, robust under appropriately devised approximations. Here we present a possible algorithm that allows to systematically approximate the equilibration value of local operators after a quantum quench. At the core of our proposal there is the idea to transform entanglement between distant parts of the system into mixture, and at the same time preserving the local reduced density matrices of the system. We benchmark the resulting algorithm by studying quenches of quadratic Fermionic Hamiltonians.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗
arXiv2018

Correlation-assisted process tomography

Standard quantum process tomography on a $d$-dimensional input is performed by preparing several states of an input probe that then evolve under the action of the quantum channel corresponding to the progress. The final states of the probe are reconstructed by means of state tomography. An alternative is offered by ancilla-assisted process tomography: a single probe-ancilla state is used, and the correlations existing between probe and ancilla are exploited to fully reconstruct the information on the channel. In order for ancilla-assisted process tomography to be possible, the probe-ancilla input state does not need to be entangled, but still needs to have maximal operator Schmidt rank. Here we establish and analyze a framework for process tomography that interpolates between these two methods, aiming at exploiting any correlations that may exist between probe and ancilla to allow process tomography with as few input preparations as possible, when the probe-ancilla state may be operator-Schmidt-rank deficient. The main object of our investigation is the minimal number of initial local operations on the input probe for a given starting probe-ancilla state that are needed to allow process tomography. We prove that such a number scales inversely proportional to the operator Schmidt rank of the input probe-ancilla state for arbitrary local input processing. We also provide results for the case where this initial local processing is restricted to be a unitary rotation, in particular showing that the mentioned scaling is satisfied for pure input entangled states, and that in the case of mixed states there might be extreme cases where the fixed input probe-ancilla state provides information on a $\approx d^2/2$-dimensional subspace of the operator space and a single additional input unitary rotation allows process tomography.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2018

Converting multilevel nonclassicality into genuine multipartite entanglement

Characterizing genuine quantum resources and determining operational rules for their manipulation are crucial steps to appraise possibilities and limitations of quantum technologies. Two such key resources are nonclassicality, manifested as quantum superposition between reference states of a single system, and entanglement, capturing quantum correlations among two or more subsystems. Here we present a general formalism for the conversion of nonclassicality into multipartite entanglement, showing that a faithful reversible transformation between the two resources is always possible within a precise resource-theoretic framework. Specializing to quantum coherence between the levels of a quantum system as an instance of nonclassicality, we introduce explicit protocols for such a mapping. We further show that the conversion relates multilevel coherence and multipartite entanglement not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively, restricting the amount of entanglement achievable in the process and in particular yielding an equality between the two resources when quantified by fidelity-based geometric measures.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2018

Generic emergence of objectivity of observables in infinite dimensions

Quantum Darwinism posits that information becomes objective whenever multiple observers indirectly probe a quantum system by each measuring a fraction of the environment. It was recently shown that objectivity of observables emerges generically from the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, whenever the system of interest has finite dimensions and the number of environment fragments is large [F. G. S. L. Brand\~ao, M. Piani, and P. Horodecki, Nature Commun. 6, 7908 (2015)]. Despite the importance of this result, it necessarily excludes many practical systems of interest that are infinite-dimensional, including harmonic oscillators. Extending the study of Quantum Darwinism to infinite dimensions is a nontrivial task: we tackle it here by using a modified diamond norm, suitable to quantify the distinguishability of channels in infinite dimensions. We prove two theorems that bound the emergence of objectivity, first for finite energy systems, and then for systems that can only be prepared in states with an exponential energy cut-off. We show that the latter class of states includes any bounded-energy subset of single-mode Gaussian states.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2018

A simple class of bound entangled states based on the properties of the antisymmetric subspace

We provide a simple construction of bipartite entangled states that are positive under partial transposition, and hence undistillable. The construction makes use of the properties of the projectors onto the symmetric and antisymmetric subspaces of the Hilbert space of two identical systems. The resulting states can be considered as generalizations of the celebrated Werner states.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2018

Genuine Distributed Coherence

We introduce a notion of genuine distributed coherence. Such a notion is based on the possibility of concentrating on individual systems the coherence present in a distributed system, by making use of incoherent unitary transformations. We define an entropic quantifier of genuine distributed multipartite coherence for generic mixed states, and we focus on the bipartite pure-state case. In the latter case we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the possibility of fully localizing the coherence, hence identifying the conditions for genuine distributed bipartite coherence. We analyze in detail the quantitative problem for the case of two-qubit pure states, identifying the states with the largest amount of genuine distributed coherence. Interestingly, such states do not have maximal global coherence nor maximal coherence rank.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2017

Certification and Quantification of Multilevel Quantum Coherence

Quantum coherence, present whenever a quantum system exists in a superposition of multiple classically distinct states, marks one of the fundamental departures from classical physics. Quantum coherence has recently been investigated rigorously within a resource-theoretic formalism. However, the finer-grained notion of multilevel coherence, which explicitly takes into account the number of superposed classical states, has remained relatively unexplored. A comprehensive analysis of multi-level coherence, which acts as the single-party analogue to multi-partite entanglement, is essential for understanding natural quantum processes as well as for gauging the performance of quantum technologies. Here we develop the theoretical and experimental groundwork for characterizing and quantifying multilevel coherence. We prove that non-trivial levels of purity are required for multilevel coherence, as there is a ball of states around the maximally mixed state that do not exhibit multilevel coherence in any basis. We provide a simple necessary and sufficient analytical criterion to verify multilevel coherence, which leads to a complete classification for three-level systems. We present the robustness of multilevel coherence, a bona fide quantifier which we show to be numerically computable via semidefinite programming and experimentally accessible via multilevel coherence witnesses. We further verify and lower-bound the robustness of multilevel coherence by performing a semi-device-independent phase discrimination task, implemented experimentally with four-level probes in a photonic setup. Our results contribute to understanding the operational relevance of genuine multilevel coherence, also by demonstrating the key role it plays in enhanced phase discrimination---a primitive for quantum communication and metrology---and suggest new ways to reliably test the quantum behaviour of physical systems.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2017

Channel discrimination power of bipartite quantum states

We quantify the usefulness of a bipartite quantum state in the ancilla-assisted channel discrimination of arbitrary quantum channels, formally defining a worst-case-scenario channel discrimination power for bipartite quantum states. We show that such a quantifier is deeply connected with the operator Schmidt decomposition of the state. We compute the channel discrimination power exactly for pure states, and provide upper and lower bounds for general mixed states. We show that highly entangled states can outperform any state that passes the realignment criterion for separability. Furthermore, while also unentangled states can be used in ancilla-assisted channel discrimination, we show that the channel discrimination power of a state is bounded by its quantum discord.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2016

Local Broadcasting of Quantum Correlations

Operations that are trivial in the classical world, like accessing information without introducing any change or disturbance, or like copying information, become non-trivial in the quantum world. In this note we discuss several limitations in the local redistributing correlations, when it comes to dealing with bipartite quantum states. In particular, we focus on the task of local broadcasting, by discussing relevant no-go theorems, and by quantifying the non-classicality of correlations in terms of the degree to which local broadcasting is possible in an approximate fashion.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2016

Should Entanglement Measures be Monogamous or Faithful?

"Is entanglement monogamous?" asks the title of a popular article [B. Terhal, IBM J. Res. Dev. 48, 71 (2004)], celebrating C. H. Bennett's legacy on quantum information theory. While the answer is affirmative in the qualitative sense, the situation is less clear if monogamy is intended as a quantitative limitation on the distribution of bipartite entanglement in a multipartite system, given some particular measure of entanglement. Here, we formalize what it takes for a bipartite measure of entanglement to obey a general quantitative monogamy relation on all quantum states. We then prove that an important class of entanglement measures fail to be monogamous in this general sense of the term, with monogamy violations becoming generic with increasing dimension. In particular, we show that every additive and suitably normalized entanglement measure cannot satisfy any nontrivial general monogamy relation while at the same time faithfully capturing the geometric entanglement structure of the fully antisymmetric state in arbitrary dimension. Nevertheless, monogamy of such entanglement measures can be recovered if one allows for dimension-dependent relations, as we show explicitly with relevant examples.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2016

Robustness of asymmetry and coherence of quantum states

Quantum states may exhibit asymmetry with respect to the action of a given group. Such an asymmetry of states can be considered as a resource in applications such as quantum metrology, and it is a concept that encompasses quantum coherence as a special case. We introduce explicitly and study the robustness of asymmetry, a quantifier of asymmetry of states that we prove to have many attractive properties, including efficient numerical computability via semidefinite programming, and an operational interpretation in a channel discrimination context. We also introduce the notion of asymmetry witnesses, whose measurement in a laboratory detects the presence of asymmetry. We prove that properly constrained asymmetry witnesses provide lower bounds to the robustness of asymmetry, which is shown to be a directly measurable quantity itself. We then focus our attention on coherence witnesses and the robustness of coherence, for which we prove a number of additional results; these include an analysis of its specific relevance in phase discrimination and quantum metrology, an analytical calculation of its value for a relevant class of quantum states, and tight bounds that relate it to another previously defined coherence monotone.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2016

Robustness of coherence: An operational and observable measure of quantum coherence

Quantifying coherence is an essential endeavour for both quantum foundations and quantum technologies. Here the robustness of coherence is defined and proven a full monotone in the context of the recently introduced resource theories of quantum coherence. The measure is shown to be observable, as it can be recast as the expectation value of a coherence witness operator for any quantum state. The robustness of coherence is evaluated analytically on relevant classes of states, and an efficient semidefinite program that computes it on general states is given. An operational interpretation is finally provided: the robustness of coherence quantifies the advantage enabled by a quantum state in a phase-discrimination task.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2016

Quantum reference frames associated with non-compact groups: the case of translations and boosts, and the role of mass

Quantum communication without a shared reference frame or the construction of a relational quantum theory requires the notion of a quantum reference frame. We analyze aspects of quantum reference frames associated with non-compact groups, specifically the group of spatial translations and Galilean boosts. We begin by demonstrating how the usually employed group average, used to dispense of the notion of an external reference frame, leads to unphysical states when applied to reference frames associated with non-compact groups. However, we show that this average does lead naturally to a reduced state on the relative degrees of freedom of a system, which was previously considered by Angelo et al. [1]. We then study in detail the informational properties of this reduced state for systems of two and three particles in Gaussian states.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2015

Generic emergence of classical features in quantum Darwinism

Quantum Darwinism explains the emergence of classical reality from the underlying quantum reality by the fact that a quantum system is observed indirectly, by looking at parts of its environment, so that only specific information about the system that is redundantly proliferated to many parts of the environment becomes accessible and objective. However it is not clear under what conditions this mechanism holds true. Here we rigorously prove that the emergence of classicality is a general feature of any quantum dynamics: observers who acquire information about a quantum system indirectly have access at most to classical information about one and the same measurement of the quantum system; moreover, if such information is available to many observers, they necessarily agree. Remarkably, our analysis goes beyond the system-environment categorization. We also provide a full characterization of the so-called quantum discord in terms of local redistribution of correlations.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2015

Hierarchy of efficiently computable and faithful lower bounds to quantum discord

Quantum discord expresses a fundamental non-classicality of correlations more general than quantum entanglement. We combine the no-local-broadcasting theorem, semidefinite-programming characterizations of quantum fidelity and quantum separability, and a recent breakthrough result of Fawzi and Renner about quantum Markov chains to provide a hierarchy of computationally efficient lower bounds to quantum discord. Such a hierarchy converges to the surprisal of measurement recoverability introduced by Seshadreesan and Wilde, and provides a faithful lower bound to quantum discord already at the lowest non-trivial level. Furthermore, the latter constitutes by itself a valid discord-like measure of the quantumness of correlations.

quant-ph↗