arXiv subjects

Matteo Fadel

Publications and source records attributed to Matteo Fadel.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Observing Bell Inequality Violation Beyond the Qubit Bound in a Spinor Bose--Einstein Condensate

Correlations allowed by quantum mechanics can defy any classical explanation, with Bell nonlocality standing as their most profound and operationally powerful manifestation. While nonlocality has been demonstrated across a wide range of platforms, in many-body systems it has remained limited to ensembles of qubits, leaving the observation of higher-dimensional multipartite Bell correlations an open challenge. Here we report the observation of qutrit Bell correlations in a spin-1 $^{87}$Rb Bose-Einstein condensate via the violation of a Bell witness based on collective spin observables only. Exploiting spin-exchange collisions in an ensemble of $N \simeq 3.1 \times 10^{4}$ atoms, we generate spin-nematic squeezing of $-11.8(7)$ dB and observe a violation that surpasses the minimum bound achievable by a collection of $N$ qubits, providing direct evidence of genuine multipartite qutrit Bell correlations. Our results establish spinor Bose-Einstein condensates as a viable platform for investigating high-dimensional Bell correlations in the many-body regime, and demonstrate that coarse-grained collective measurements suffice to certify the dimensionality of quantum correlations at macroscopic scales.

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arXiv2026

Effective Faraday interaction between light and Helium-3 nuclear spins in a multi-pass cell

Helium-3 nuclear spins form an exceptionally stable quantum system with extremely long coherence time, offering exciting opportunities for quantum technologies. In particular, nuclear spin-squeezed states promise enhanced precision for sensing tasks and tests of new physics. A central challenge for all these applications is the realization of a controllable light-nuclear spin interface. Here we experimentally demonstrate such an interface by exploiting metastability-exchange collisions in a low-pressure helium-3 gas cell at room temperature. A radio-frequency discharge produces a small population of metastable atoms that both enables efficient optical pumping and mediates an effective Faraday interaction between the collective nuclear spin and an optical probe. We quantitatively characterize the strength of this interaction as a function of the nuclear polarization, applied magnetic field, and probe-beam parameters. Moreover, we show that using a multi-pass cell enhances this interaction by effectively increasing the optical depth. Extrapolating to a tenfold increase of the probe power used in the present experiment, we project a measurement-induced squeezing rate of 0.52 s$^{-1}$. Our results provide a practical pathway for optical access to helium-3 nuclear spins and open prospects for generating long-lived, macroscopic nuclear spin-squeezed states for quantum metrology.

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arXiv2026

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

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arXiv2026

Stochastic signal sensing with finite energy and dead time at the fundamental quantum limit

State preparation, measurement, and reset operations take finite time and use finite energy in realistic experiments, yet the impact of this on optimal quantum metrological protocols is not properly understood. We study the effect on sensing a stochastic signal, relevant for the detection of ultralight dark matter and other searches for fundamental physics. We prove that two-mode squeezed vacuum is the optimal probe state given a finite mean-energy constraint for a family of incoherent sensing problems, including noise sensing and quantum illumination. For estimating a gain independent of a loss, we show that entanglement is a required resource to achieve the fundamental quantum limit and observe a non-Gaussian to Gaussian transition in the optimal unentangled state as the dead time increases. We apply our results to bulk acoustic wave resonators.

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arXiv2026

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between mechanical oscillators revealed through SU(1,1) interferometry

Quantum correlations are essential for achieving quantum advantage in computing, communication and sensing. Moreover, their observation challenges and constrains our fundamental understanding of nature. Mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime provide an appealing platform for preparing and investigating quantum correlations at macroscopic scales. Despite substantial progress, however, continuous-variable quantum correlations stronger than entanglement have not yet been observed in this macroscopic regime. Here, we report the experimental observation of continuous-variable Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between two spatially-separated mechanical oscillators with an effective mass of $\sim 16 \,\mu g$ each. This is achieved by coupling them to a superconducting qubit which allows for engineering a two-mode squeezing interaction when parametrically driven. Crucially, we show that this interaction can be used to witness quantum correlations through the realization of a mechanical SU(1,1) interferometer. Our results expand the toolbox of operations in circuit quantum acoustodynamics and demonstrate that quantum correlations stronger than entanglement can also be observed in macroscopic systems, thereby shedding light on the boundary between quantum and classical regimes.

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arXiv2026

Non-Gaussian Entanglement Hierarchy Based on the Schmidt Number

Non-Gaussian entanglement is a promising resource in various quantum tasks. A recently defined class identifies entanglement that cannot be generated by applying Gaussian operations to separable inputs. To further explore the entanglement in this context, we introduce a quantitative witness $E_{\rm NG}$ in bipartite bosonic systems, which satisfies $E_{\rm NG}=1$ for all Gaussian-entanglable states, while $E_{\rm NG}>1$ certifies non-Gaussian entanglement. Its ceiling $d=\lceil E_{\rm NG}\rceil$ provides a lower bound on the Schmidt number irreducible by Gaussian transformations, thereby defining a natural hierarchy of non-Gaussian entanglement. For pure states, the condition is sharp and the hierarchy reflects the complexity of state learning. We benchmark the framework with some paradigmatic non-Gaussian states, such as NOON states and squeezed Kerr states, and analyze its robustness against loss. Moreover, we construct an experimentally economical NOON-type witness requiring only four density-matrix element measurements. These results establish an operationally meaningful and experimentally accessible framework for identifying non-Gaussian entanglement resources in continuous-variable quantum platforms.

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arXiv2026

Magnonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states

Bosonic quantum error correction encodes a logical qubit in an oscillator, avoiding the hardware overhead of large qubit arrays. Among such encodings, Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states are paticularly powerful because their phase-space grid structure protects against small displacement errors simultaneously in both conjugate quadratures. Here we provide the first protocol for preparing magnonic GKP states, which involves an ellipsoidal magnetic crystal effectively coupled to a superconducting qubit via a microwave cavity. The geometric anisotropy intrinsically squeezes the magnon mode, while the cavity-mediated qubit control realizes an effective conditional-displacement interaction. We show that two rounds of a conditional-displacement interaction and a qubit projective measurement yield three- and four-component magnonic GKP-like states. We also show how to realize single logical qubit gate operations, such as Pauli, Hadamard and phase gates, completing the logical Pauli basis of the approximate GKP code. Our results establish hybrid magnon-qubit systems as a promising platform for preparing bosonic code states, with applications in magnonic fault-tolerant quantum computation and quantum sensing.

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arXiv2026

Loss Mechanisms in High-coherence Multimode Mechanical Resonators Coupled to Superconducting Circuits

Circuit quantum acoustodynamics (cQAD) devices have a wide range of applications in quantum science, all of which depend crucially on the quantum coherence of the mechanical subsystem. In this context, high-overtone bulk acoustic-wave resonators (HBARs) are particularly promising, since they have shown very high quality factors with negligible dephasing. However, the introduction of piezoelectric films, which are necessary for coupling to a superconducting circuit, can lead to additional loss channels, such as surface scattering and two-level systems (TLS). Here, we study the acoustic dissipation of HBAR resonators in cQAD systems and find that the defect density of the piezoelectric material and its interface with the bulk are limiting factors for the coherence. We measure acoustic modes with phonon lifetimes up to 400 $\mu$s and lifetime-limited coherence times approaching one millisecond in the quantum regime. When coupled to a superconducting qubit, this leads to a hybrid system with a large quantum coherence cooperativity of $C_{T_2}=1.1\times10^5$. These results represent a new milestone for the performance of cQAD devices and offer concrete paths forward for further improvements.

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arXiv2026

Preparing squeezed, cat and GKP states with parity measurements

Bosonic modes constitute a central resource in a wide range of quantum technologies, providing long-lived degrees of freedom for the storage, processing, and transduction of quantum information. Such modes naturally arise in platforms including circuit quantum electrodynamics, quantum acoustodynamics, and trapped-ion systems. In these architectures, coherent control and high-fidelity readout of the bosonic degrees of freedom are achieved via coupling to an auxiliary qubit. When operated in the strong dispersive regime, this interaction enables parity measurements of the mode which, in combination with phase-space displacements, constitute a standard experimental tool for full Wigner-function tomography. Here, we propose a protocol based on displaced parity measurements that allows for the preparation of a variety of bosonic quantum states. As a first example, we demonstrate the generation of squeezed states, achieving up to ~9 dB of squeezing after only three parity measurements, and show that the protocol is robust against experimental imperfections. Finally, we generalize our approach to the preparation of other paradigmatic bosonic states, including cat and Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill states.

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arXiv2026

Distributed Phase-Insensitive Displacement Sensing

Distributed quantum sensing leverages quantum correlations among multiple sensors to enhance the precision of parameter estimation beyond classical limits. Most existing approaches target phase estimation and rely on a shared phase reference between the signal and the probe, yet many relevant scenarios deal with regimes where such a reference is absent, making the estimation of force or field amplitudes the main task. We study this phase-insensitive regime for bosonic sensors that undergo identical displacements with common phases randomly varying between experimental runs. We derive analytical bounds on the achievable precision and show that it is determined by first-order normal correlations between modes in the probe state, constrained by their average excitations. These correlations yield a collective sensitivity enhancement over the standard quantum limit, with a gain that grows linearly in the total excitation number, revealing a distributed quantum advantage even without a global phase reference. We identify families of multimode states with definite joint parity that saturate this limit and can be probed efficiently via local parity measurements already demonstrated or emerging in several quantum platforms. We further demonstrate that experimentally relevant decoherence channels favor two distinct sensing strategies: splitting of a single-mode nonclassical state among the modes, which is robust to loss and heating, and separable probes, which are instead resilient to dephasing and phase jitter. Our results are relevant to multimode continuous platforms, including trapped-ion, solid-state mechanical, optomechanical, superconducting, and photonic systems.

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arXiv2025

Many-body $k$-local ground states as probes for unitary quantum metrology

Multipartite quantum states saturating the Heisenberg limit of sensitivity typically require full-body correlators to be prepared. On the other hand, experimentally practical Hamiltonians often involve few-body correlators only. Here, we study the metrological performances under this constraint, using tools derived from the quantum Fisher information. Our work applies to any encoding generator, also including a dependence on the parameter. We find that typical random symmetric ground states of $k$-body permutation-invariant Hamiltonians exhibit Heisenberg scaling. Finally, we establish a tradeoff between the Hamiltonian's gap, which quantifies preparation hardness, and the quantum Fisher information of the corresponding ground state.

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arXiv2025

Detection of non-Gaussian quantum correlations through measurement-after-interaction protocols

Additional state evolutions performed before measurement, also called measurement-after-interactions (MAI) protocols, have shown a great potential for increasing the sensitivity of metrological scenarios. Here, we go beyond this result and show that MAI techniques can significantly enhance the detection capability of witnesses for quantum correlations. In particular, we show the possibility of detecting Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering and mode entanglement of non-Gaussian states from linear measurements only. Moreover, we show that such approach allows for a significantly higher noise robustness.

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arXiv2025

Witnessing genuine multipartite entanglement in phase space with controlled Gaussian unitaries

Many existing genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) witnesses for continuous-variable (CV) quantum systems typically rely on quadrature measurements, which are challenging to implement in platforms where the CV degrees of freedom can be indirectly accessed only through qubit readouts. In this work, we propose methods to implement GME witnesses through phase-space measurements in state-of-the-art experimental platforms, leveraging controlled Gaussian unitaries readily available in qubit-CV architectures. Based on two theoretical results showing that sufficient Wigner negativity can certify GME, we present five concrete implementation schemes using controlled parity, displacement, and beam-splitter operations. Our witnesses can detect paradigmatic GME states like the Dicke and multipartite $N00N$ states, which include the $W$ states as a special case, and GHZ-type entangled cat states. We analyze the performance of these witnesses under realistic noise conditions and finite measurement resolution, showing their robustness to experimental imperfections. Crucially, our implementations require exponentially fewer measurement settings than full tomography, with one scheme requiring only a single measurement on auxiliary modes. The methods are readily applicable to circuit/cavity quantum electrodynamics, circuit quantum acoustodynamics, as well as trapped ions and atomic systems, where such dichotomic phase-space measurements are already routinely performed as native readouts.

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arXiv2025

Sufficient Wigner Negativity Implies Genuine Multipartite Entanglement

Wigner negativity and genuine multipartite entanglement (GME) are key nonclassical resources that enable computational advantages and broader quantum-information tasks. In this work, we prove two theorems for multimode continuous-variable systems that relate these nonclassical resources. Both theorems show that sufficient Wigner negativity-either a sufficiently-large Wigner negativity volume along a suitably-chosen two-dimensional slice, or a sufficiently-large nonclassicality depth of the center-of-mass mode of a system-certifies the presence of GME. Moreover, violations of the latter inequality provide lower bounds of the trace distance to the set of non-GME states. Our results also provide sufficient conditions for generating GME by interfering a state with the vacuum through a multiport interferometer, complementing long-known necessary conditions. Beyond these fundamental connections, our methods have practical advantages for systems with native phase-space measurements: they require only measuring the Wigner function over a finite region, or measuring a finite number of characteristic function points. Such measurements are frequently performed with readouts common in circuit and cavity quantum electrodynamic systems, trapped ions and atoms, and circuit quantum acoustodynamic systems. As such, our GME criteria are readily implementable in these platforms.

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arXiv2025

Entanglement Dimensionality of Continuous Variable States From Phase-Space Quasi-Probabilities

The dimensionality of entanglement is a core tenet of quantum information processing, especially quantum communication and computation. While it is natural to think of this dimensionality in finite dimensional systems, many of the implementations harnessing high Schmidt numbers are actually based on discretising the observables of continuous variable systems. For those instances, a core question is whether directly utilizing the toolbox of continuous variable quantum information processing leads to better and more robust characterisations of entanglement dimensionality in infinite dimensional systems. We affirmatively answer this question by introducing Schmidt number witnesses for CV systems, based directly on covariances of infinite dimensional Bloch operators that are readily accessible in experiments. We show that the direct estimation leads to increased robustness and versatility compared to first discretising the system and using canonical discrete variable techniques, which provides strong motivation for further developments of genuine CV methods for the characterization of entanglement dimensionality, as well as for their implementation in experiments.

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arXiv2025

Ultracold Mechanical Quantum Sensor for Tests of New Physics

Initialization of mechanical modes in the quantum ground state is crucial for their use in quantum information and quantum sensing protocols. In quantum processors, impurity of the modes' initial state affects the infidelity of subsequent quantum algorithms. In quantum sensors, excitations out of the ground state contribute to the noise of the detector, and their prevalence puts a bound on rare events that deposit energy into the mechanical modes. In this work, we measure the excited-state populations of GHz-frequency modes in a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator (HBAR). We find that the population of the first excited state can be as low as $P_p$=(1.2$\pm$5.5)$\times10^{-5}$, corresponding to an effective temperature of 25.2 mK, which are upper bounds limited by imperfections in the measurement process. These results compare favorably to the lowest populations measured in superconducting circuits. Finally, we use the measured populations to constrain the amplitude of high-frequency gravitational waves, the kinetic mixing strength of ultra-light dark matter, and non-linear modifications of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation describing wavefunction collapse mechanisms. Our work establishes HBARs as a versatile resource for quantum state initialization and studies of fundamental physics.

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arXiv2025

Distributed quantum sensing with measurement-after-interaction strategies

We investigate multiparameter quantum estimation protocols based on measurement-after-interaction (MAI) strategies, in which the probe state undergoes an additional evolution prior to linear measurements. As we show in our study, this extra evolution enables different level of advantages depending on whether it is implemented locally or nonlocally across the sensing nodes. By benchmarking MAI strategies in both discrete- and continuous-variable systems, we show that they can significantly enhance multiparameter sensitivity and robustness against detection noise, particularly when non-Gaussian probe states are employed, cases where standard linear measurements are often insufficient. We also derive analytical results for multiparameter squeezing and establish the corresponding scaling laws for spin-squeezed states, demonstrating that MAI protocols can reach the Heisenberg scaling. These results pave the way for immediate experimental implementation in platforms such as atomic ensembles and optical fields.

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arXiv2025

Macroscopic quantum coherence and entanglement in mechanical systems

The notion of a macroscopic quantum state must be pinned down in order to assess how well experiments probe the large-scale limits of quantum mechanics. However, the issue of quantifying so-called quantum macroscopicity is fraught with multiple approaches having varying interpretations and levels of computability and measurability. Here, we introduce two measures that capture independent macroscopic properties: i) extensive size, measuring the degree of coherence in position or momentum observables relative to atomic-scale units, and ii) entangled size, quantifying the number of entangled subsystems. These measures unify many desirable features of past proposals while having rigorously justified interpretations from quantum information theory in terms of coherence and multipartite entanglement. We demonstrate how to estimate them and obtain lower-bounds using experimental data from micro-mechanical oscillators and diffracting molecules. Notably, we find evidence for genuine multipartite entanglement of $10^6$ to $10^7$ atoms in recent mechanical superposition states.

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