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P. H. Souto Ribeiro

Publications and source records attributed to P. H. Souto Ribeiro.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Remote preparation of single photon vortex thermal states

Photon pairs produced in spontaneous parametric down-conversion are naturally entangled in their transverse spatial degrees of freedom including the orbital angular momentum. Pumping a non-linear crystal with a zero order Gaussian mode produces quantum correlated signal and idler photons with equal orbital angular momentum and opposite signs. Measurements performed on one of the photons prepares the state of the other remotely. We study the remote state preparation in this system from the perspective of its potential application to Quantum Thermodynamics.

quant-ph↗

Real-time Phase Conjugation of Vector Vortex Beams

Vector vortex beams have played a fundamental role in the better understanding of coherence and polarization. They are described by spatially inhomogeneous polarization states, which present a rich optical mode structure that has attracted much attention for applications in optical communications, imaging, spectroscopy and metrology. However, this complex mode structure can be quite detrimental when propagation effects such as turbulence and birefringence perturb the beam. Optical phase conjugation has been proposed as a method to recover an optical beam from perturbations. Here we demonstrate full phase conjugation of vector vortex beams using three-wave mixing. Our scheme exploits a fast non-linear process that can be conveniently controlled via the pump beam. Our results pave the way for sophisticated, practical applications of vector beams.

physics.optics↗

Experimental quantum thermodynamics with linear optics

The study of non-equilibrium physics from the perspective of the quantum limits of thermodynamics and fluctuation relations can be experimentally addressed with linear optical systems. We discuss recent experimental investigations in this scenario and present new proposed schemes and the potential advances they could bring to the field.

quant-ph↗

Klyshko's Advanced-Wave Picture in Stimulated Parametric Down-Conversion with a Spatially Structured Pump Beam

The advanced-wave picture is "... an intuitive treatment of two-photon correlation with the help of the concept of an effective field acting upon one of the two detectors and formed by parametric conversion of the advanced wave emitted by the second detector ..." [A. V. Belinskii and D. N. Klyshko, JETP 78, 259 (1994)]. This quote from Belinskii and Klyshko nicely describes the concept of the advanced-wave picture; an intuitive tool for designing and predicting results from coincidence-based two-photon experiments. Up to now, the advanced-wave picture has been considered primarily for the case of an ideal plane-wave pump beam and only for design purposes. Here we study the advanced wave picture for a structured pump beam and in the context of stimulated emission provoked by an auxiliary input laser beam. This suggests stimulated parametric down-conversion as a useful experimental tool for testing the experimental sets designed with the advanced-wave picture. We present experimental results demonstrating the strategy of designing the experiment with advanced-wave picture and testing with stimulated emission.

quant-ph↗

Experimental study of quantum thermodynamics using optical vortices

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum information theory are interrelated research fields witnessing an increasing interest, both theoretical and experimental. This is manly due to the broadness of these theories, which found applications in many different fields of science, ranging from biology to the foundations of physics. Here, by employing the orbital angular momentum of light, we propose a new platform for studying non-equilibrium properties of high dimensional quantum systems. Specifically, we use Laguerre-Gaussian beams to emulate the energy eigenstates of a two-dimension quantum harmonic oscillator having angular momentum. These light beams are subjected to a process realized by a spatial light modulator and the corresponding work distribution is experimentally reconstructed employing a two-point measurement scheme. The Jarzynski fluctuation relation is then verified. We also demonstrate the operation of the system as a Maxwell's demon.

quant-ph↗

Experimental multipartite entanglement and randomness certification of the W state in the quantum steering scenario

Recently [Cavalcanti \textit{et al.} Nat Commun \textbf{6}, 7941 (2015)] proposed a method to certify the presence of entanglement in asymmetric networks, where some users do not have control over the measurements they are performing. Such asymmetry naturally emerges in realistic situtations, such as in cryptographic protocols over quantum networks. Here we implement such "semi-device independent" techniques to experimentally witness all types of entanglement on a three-qubit photonic W state. Furthermore we analise the amount of genuine randomness that can be certified in this scenario from any bipartition of the three-qubit W state.

quant-ph↗

Work distribution in a photonic system

We present a proposal of a set-up to measure the work distribution due to an arbitrary unitary process acting on the spatial transverse degrees of freedom of a light beam. Hermite-Gaussian optical modes representing a quantum harmonic oscillator are prepared in a thermal state and sent through an interferometer. We show that the Fourier transform of the work distribution, or the characteristic function, can be obtained by measuring the intensity at the output of the interferometer. The usefulness of the approach is illustrated by calculating the work distribution for a unitary operation that displaces the linear momentum of the oscillator. We discuss the feasibility of the experiment, which can be realized with simple linear optical components.

quant-ph↗

Detection of entanglement in asymmetric quantum networks and multipartite quantum steering

The future of quantum communication relies on quantum networks composed by observers sharing multipartite quantum states. The certification of multipartite entanglement will be crucial to the usefulness of these networks. In many real situations it is natural to assume that some observers are more trusted than others in the sense that they have more knowledge of their measurement apparatuses. Here we propose a general method to certify all kinds of multipartite entanglement in this asymmetric scenario and experimentally demonstrate it in an optical experiment. Our results, which can be seen as a definition of genuine multipartite quantum steering, give a method to detect entanglement in a scenario in between the standard entanglement and fully device-independent scenarios, and provide a basis for semi-device-independent cryptographic applications in quantum networks.

quant-ph↗

Experimental determination of multipartite entanglement with incomplete information

Multipartite entanglement is very poorly understood despite all the theoretical and experimental advances of the last decades. Preparation, manipulation and identification of this resource is crucial for both practical and fundamental reasons. However, the difficulty in the practical manipulation and the complexity of the data generated by measurements on these systems increase rapidly with the number of parties. Therefore, we would like to experimentally address the problem of how much information about multipartite entanglement we can access with incomplete measurements. In particular, it was shown that some types of pure multipartite entangled states can be witnessed without measuring the correlations [M. Walter et al., Science 340, 1205 (2013)] between parties, which is strongly demanding experimentally. We explore this method using an optical setup that permits the preparation and the complete tomographic reconstruction of many inequivalent classes of three- and four-partite entangled states, and compare complete versus incomplete information. We show that the method is useful in practice, even for non-pure states or non ideal measurement conditions.

quant-ph↗

Deterministic Quantum Computation With One Photonic Qubit

We show that deterministic quantum computing with one qubit (DQC1) can be experimentally implemented with a spatial light modulator, using the polarization and the transverse spatial degrees of freedom of light. The scheme allows the computation of the trace of a high dimension matrix, being limited by the resolution of the modulator panel, and the technical imperfections. In order to illustrate the method, we compute the normalized trace of unitary matrices, and implement the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm. The largest matrix that can be manipulated with our set-up is 1080$\times$1920, which is able to represent a system with approximately 21 qubits.

quant-ph↗

Non-Markovianity through flow of information between a system and an environment

Exchange of information between a quantum system and its surrounding environment plays a fundamental role in the study of the dynamics of open quantum systems. Here we discuss the role of the information exchange in the non-Markovian behavior of dynamical quantum processes following the decoherence approach, where we consider a quantum system that is initially correlated with its measurement apparatus, which in turn interacts with the environment. We introduce a new way of looking at the information exchange between the system and environment using the quantum loss, which is shown to be closely related to the measure of non-Markovianity based on the quantum mutual information. We also extend the results of [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 210402 (2014)] by Fanchini et al. in several directions, providing a more detailed investigation of the use of the accessible information for quantifying the backflow of information from the environment to the system. Moreover, we reveal a clear conceptual relation between the entanglement and mutual information based measures of non-Markovianity in terms of the quantum loss and accessible information. We compare different ways of studying the information flow in two theoretical examples. We also present experimental results on the investigation of the quantum loss and accessible information for a two-level system undergoing a zero temperature amplitude damping process. We use an optical approach that allows full access to the state of the environment.

quant-ph↗

Experimental entanglement redistribution under decoherence channels

When an initially entangled pair of qubits undergoes local decoherence processes, there are a number of ways in which the original entanglement can spread throughout the multipartite system consisting of the two qubits and their environments. Here we report theoretical and experimental results regarding the dynamics of the distribution of entanglement in this system. The experiment employs an all optical set-up in which the qubits are encoded in the polarization degrees of freedom of two photons, and each local decoherence channel is implemented with an interferometer that couples the polarization to the path of each photon, which acts as an environment. We monitor the dynamics and distribution of entanglement and observe the transition from bipartite to multipartite entanglement and back, and show how these transitions are intimately related to the sudden death and sudden birth of entanglement. The multipartite entanglement is further analyzed in terms of 3- and 4- partite entanglement contributions, and genuine four-qubit entanglement is observed at some points of the evolution.

quant-ph↗

Non-Markovianity through accessible information

The degree of non-Markovianity of quantum processes has been characterized in several different ways in the recent literature. However, the relationship between the non-Markovian behavior and the flow of information between the system and the environment through an entropic measure has not been yet established. We propose an entanglement-based measure of non-Markovianity by employing the concept of assisted knowledge, where the environment E, acquires information about a system S, by means of its measurement apparatus A. The assisted knowledge, based on the accessible information in terms of von-Neumann entropy, monotonically increases in time for all Markovian quantum processes. We demonstrate that the signatures of non-Markovianity can be captured by the nonmonotonic behaviour of the assisted knowledge. We explore this scenario for a two-level system undergoing a relaxation process, through an experimental implementation using an optical approach that allows full access to the state of the environment.

quant-ph↗

Characterization of a spatial light modulator as a polarization quantum channel

Spatial light modulators are versatile devices employed in a vast range of applications to modify the transverse phase or amplitude profile of an incident light beam. Most experiments are designed to use a specific polarization which renders optimal sensitivity for phase or amplitude modulation. Here we take a different approach and apply the formalism of quantum information to characterize how a phase modulator affects a general polarization state. In this context, the spatial modulators can be exploited as a resource to couple the polarization and the transverse spatial degrees of freedom. Using a quasi-monochromatic single photon beam obtained from a pair of twin photons generated by spontaneous parametric down conversion, we performed quantum process tomography in order to obtain a general analytic model for a quantum channel that describes the action of the device on the polarization qubits. We illustrate the application of these concepts by demonstrating the implementation of a controllable phase flip channel. This scheme can be applied in a straightforward manner to characterize the resulting polarization states of different types of phase or amplitude modulators and motivates the combined use of polarization and spatial degrees of freedom in innovative applications.

quant-ph↗

Linear-optical simulation of the cooling of a cluster-state Hamiltonian system

A measurement-based quantum computer could consist of a local-gapped Hamiltonian system, whose thermal states --at sufficiently low temperature-- are universal resources for the computation. Initialization of the computer would correspond to cooling the system. We perform an experimental quantum simulation of such cooling process with entangled photons. We prepare three-qubit thermal cluster states exploiting the equivalence between local dephasing and thermalisation for these states. This allows us to tune the system's temperature by changing the dephasing strength. We monitor the entanglement as the system cools down and observe the transitions from separability to bound entanglement, and then to free entanglement. We also analyze the performance of the system for measurement-based single-qubit state preparation. These studies constitute a basic characterisation of experimental cluster-state computation under imperfect conditions.

quant-ph↗

Experimental Observation of Quantum Chaos in a Beam of Light

The manner in which unpredictable chaotic dynamics manifests itself in quantum mechanics is a key question in the field of quantum chaos. Indeed, very distinct quantum features can appear due to underlying classical nonlinear dynamics. Here we observe signatures of quantum nonlinear dynamics through the direct measurement of the time-evolved Wigner function of the quantum-kicked harmonic oscillator, implemented in the spatial degrees of freedom of light. Our setup is decoherence-free and we can continuously tune the semiclassical and chaos parameters, so as to explore the transition from regular to essentially chaotic dynamics. Owing to its robustness and versatility, our scheme can be used to experimentally investigate a variety of nonlinear quantum phenomena. As an example, we couple this system to a quantum bit and experimentally investigate the decoherence produced by regular or chaotic dynamics.

quant-ph↗

Ancilla-assisted measurement of photonic spatial correlations and entanglement

We report an experiment in which the moments of spatial coordinates of down-converted photons are measured directly, without having to reconstruct any marginal probability distributions. We use a spatial light modulator to couple the spatial degrees of freedom and the polarization of the fields, which act as ancilla systems. Information about the spatial correlations is obtained via measurements on the ancilla qubits. Among other applications, this new method provides a more efficient technique to identify continuous variable entanglement.

quant-ph↗

Flow of Quantum Correlations from a Two-Qubit System to its Environment

The open-system dynamics of entanglement plays an important role in the assessment of the robustness of quantum information processes and also in the investigation of the classical limit of quantum mechanics. Here we show that, subjacent to this dynamics, there is a subtle flow of quantum correlations. We use a recently proposed optical setup, which allows joint tomography of system and environment, to show that the decay of an initial bipartite entangled state leads to the build up of multipartite entanglement and quantum discord, the latter exhibiting a non-analytic behavior that signals the emergence of maximal genuine quantum entanglement. The origin of this analyticity is shown to be distinct from similar behavior previously found in bipartite systems. Monogamy relations within the context of open-system dynamics explain this new phenomenon.

quant-ph↗