arXiv subjects

Patrick J. Coles

Publications and source records attributed to Patrick J. Coles.

105 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

An equality between entanglement and uncertainty

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that if one party (Alice) prepares a system and randomly measures one of two incompatible observables, then another party (Bob) cannot perfectly predict the measurement outcomes. This implication assumes that Bob does not possess an additional system that is entangled to the measured one; indeed the seminal paper of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) showed that maximal entanglement allows Bob to perfectly win this guessing game. Although not in contradiction, the observations made by EPR and Heisenberg illustrate two extreme cases of the interplay between entanglement and uncertainty. On the one hand, no entanglement means that Bob's predictions must display some uncertainty. Yet on the other hand, maximal entanglement means that there is no more uncertainty at all. Here we follow an operational approach and give an exact relation - an equality - between the amount of uncertainty as measured by the guessing probability, and the amount of entanglement as measured by the recoverable entanglement fidelity. From this equality we deduce a simple criterion for witnessing bipartite entanglement and a novel entanglement monogamy equality.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

State-Dependent Approach to Entropic Measurement-Disturbance Relations

Heisenberg's intuition was that there should be a tradeoff between measuring a particle's position with greater precision and disturbing its momentum. Recent formulations of this idea have focused on the question of how well two complementary observables can be jointly measured. Here, we provide an alternative approach based on how enhancing the predictability of one observable necessarily disturbs a complementary one. Our measurement-disturbance relation refers to a clear operational scenario and is expressed by entropic quantities with clear statistical meaning. We show that our relation is perfectly tight for all measurement strengths in an existing experimental setup involving qubit measurements.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

Equivalence of wave-particle duality to entropic uncertainty

Interferometers capture a basic mystery of quantum mechanics: a single particle can exhibit wave behavior, yet that wave behavior disappears when one tries to determine the particle's path inside the interferometer. This idea has been formulated quantitively as an inequality, e.g., by Englert and Jaeger, Shimony, and Vaidman, which upper bounds the sum of the interference visibility and the path distinguishability. Such wave-particle duality relations (WPDRs) are often thought to be conceptually inequivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, although this has been debated. Here we show that WPDRs correspond precisely to a modern formulation of the uncertainty principle in terms of entropies, namely the min- and max-entropies. This observation unifies two fundamental concepts in quantum mechanics. Furthermore, it leads to a robust framework for deriving novel WPDRs by applying entropic uncertainty relations to interferometric models. As an illustration, we derive a novel relation that captures the coherence in a quantum beam splitter.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

Improved entropic uncertainty relations and information exclusion relations

The uncertainty principle can be expressed in entropic terms, also taking into account the role of entanglement in reducing uncertainty. The information exclusion principle bounds instead the correlations that can exist between the outcomes of incompatible measurements on one physical system, and a second reference system. We provide a more stringent formulation of both the uncertainty principle and the information exclusion principle, with direct applications for, e.g., the security analysis of quantum key distribution, entanglement estimation, and quantum communication. We also highlight a fundamental distinction between the complementarity of observables in terms of uncertainty and in terms of information.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2014

Complementary sequential measurements generate entanglement

We present a new paradigm for capturing the complementarity of two observables. It is based on the entanglement created by the interaction between the system observed and the two measurement devices used to measure the observables sequentially. Our main result is a lower bound on this entanglement and resembles well-known entropic uncertainty relations. Besides its fundamental interest, this result directly bounds the effectiveness of sequential bipartite operations---corresponding to the measurement interactions---for entanglement generation. We further discuss the intimate connection of our result with two primitives of information processing, namely, decoupling and coherent teleportation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2013

Role of complementarity in superdense coding

The complementarity of two observables is often captured in uncertainty relations, which quantify an inevitable tradeoff in knowledge. Here we study complementarity in the context of an information processing task: we link the complementarity of two observables to their usefulness for superdense coding (SDC). In SDC, Alice sends two classical dits of information to Bob by sending a single qudit. However, we show that encoding with commuting unitaries prevents Alice from sending more than one dit per qudit, implying that complementarity is necessary for SDC to be advantagous over a classical strategy for information transmission. When Alice encodes with products of Pauli operators for the $X$ and $Z$ bases, we quantify the complementarity of these encodings in terms of the overlap of the $X$ and $Z$ basis elements. Our main result explicitly solves for the SDC capacity as a function of the complementarity, showing that the entropy of the overlap matrix gives the capacity, when the preshared state is maximally entangled. We generalise this equation to resources with symmetric noise such as a preshared Werner state. In the most general case of arbitrary noisy resources, we obtain an analogous lower bound on the SDC capacity. Our results shed light on the role of complementarity in determining the quantum advantage in SDC and also seem fundamentally interesting since they bear a striking resemblance to uncertainty relations.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2012

Collapse of the quantum correlation hierarchy links entropic uncertainty to entanglement creation

Quantum correlations have fundamental and technological interest, and hence many measures have been introduced to quantify them. Some hierarchical orderings of these measures have been established, e.g., discord is bigger than entanglement, and we present a class of bipartite states, called premeasurement states, for which several of these hierarchies collapse to a single value. Because premeasurement states are the kind of states produced when a system interacts with a measurement device, the hierarchy collapse implies that the uncertainty of an observable is quantitatively connected to the quantum correlations (entanglement, discord, etc.) produced when that observable is measured. This fascinating connection between uncertainty and quantum correlations leads to a reinterpretation of entropic formulations of the uncertainty principle, so-called entropic uncertainty relations, including ones that allow for quantum memory. These relations can be thought of as lower-bounds on the entanglement created when incompatible observables are measured. Hence, we find that entanglement creation exhibits complementarity, a concept that should encourage exploration into "entanglement complementarity relations".

quant-ph↗

arXiv2012

Consistent histories for tunneling molecules subject to collisional decoherence

The decoherence of a two-state tunneling molecule, such as a chiral molecule or ammonia, due to collisions with a buffer gas is analyzed in terms of a succession of quantum states of the molecule satisfying the conditions for a consistent family of histories. With $\hbar ω$ the separation in energy of the levels in the isolated molecule and $γ$ a decoherence rate proportional to the rate of collisions, we find for $γ\gg ω$ (strong decoherence) a consistent family in which the molecule flips randomly back and forth between the left- and right-handed chiral states in a stationary Markov process. For $γ< ω$ there is a family in which the molecule oscillates continuously between the different chiral states, but with occasional random changes of phase, at a frequency that goes to zero at a phase transition $γ= ω$. This transition is similar to the behavior of the inversion frequency of ammonia with increasing pressure, but will be difficult to observe in chiral molecules such as D$_2$S$_2$. There are additional consistent families both for $γ> ω$ and for $γ< ω$. In addition we relate the speed with which chiral information is transferred to the environment to the rate of decrease of complementary types of information (e.g., parity information) remaining in the molecule itself.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2012

Uncertainty relations from simple entropic properties

Uncertainty relations provide constraints on how well the outcomes of incompatible measurements can be predicted, and, as well as being fundamental to our understanding of quantum theory, they have practical applications such as for cryptography and witnessing entanglement. Here we shed new light on the entropic form of these relations, showing that they follow from a few simple entropic properties, including the data processing inequality. We prove these relations without relying on the exact expression for the entropy, and hence show that a single technique applies to several entropic quantities, including the von Neumann entropy, min- and max-entropies and the Renyi entropies.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2012

Unification of different views of decoherence and discord

Macroscopic behavior such as the lack of interference patterns has been attributed to "decoherence", a word with several possible definitions such as (1) the loss of off-diagonal density matrix elements, (2) the flow of information to the environment, (3) the loss of complementary information, and (4) the loss of the ability to create entanglement in a measurement. In this article, we attempt to unify these distinct definitions by providing general quantitative connections between them, valid for all finite-dimensional quantum systems or quantum processes. The most important application of our results is to the understanding of quantum discord, a measure of the non-classicality of the correlations between quantum systems. We show that some popular measures of discord measure the information missing from the purifying system and hence quantify security, which can be stated operationally in terms of distillable secure bits. The results also give some strategies for constructing discord measures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2011

Relative entropy derivation of the uncertainty principle with quantum side information

We give a simple proof of the uncertainty principle with quantum side information, as in [Berta et al. Nature Physics 6, 659 (2010)], invoking the monotonicity of the relative entropy. Our proof shows that the entropic uncertainty principle can be viewed as a data-processing inequality, a special case of the notion that information cannot increase due to evolution in time. This leads to a systematic method for finding the minimum uncertainty states of various entropic uncertainty relations; interestingly such states are intimately connected with the reversibility of time evolution.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2011

Information theoretic treatment of tripartite systems and quantum channels

A Holevo measure is used to discuss how much information about a given POVM on system $a$ is present in another system $b$, and how this influences the presence or absence of information about a different POVM on $a$ in a third system $c$. The main goal is to extend information theorems for mutually unbiased bases or general bases to arbitrary POVMs, and especially to generalize "all-or-nothing" theorems about information located in tripartite systems to the case of \emph{partial information}, in the form of quantitative inequalities. Some of the inequalities can be viewed as entropic uncertainty relations that apply in the presence of quantum side information, as in recent work by Berta et al. [Nature Physics 6, 659 (2010)]. All of the results also apply to quantum channels: e.g., if $\EC$ accurately transmits certain POVMs, the complementary channel $\FC$ will necessarily be noisy for certain other POVMs. While the inequalities are valid for mixed states of tripartite systems, restricting to pure states leads to the basis-invariance of the difference between the information about $a$ contained in $b$ and $c$.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2011

Non-negative discord strengthens the subadditivity of quantum entropy functions

The definition of quantum discord is generalized to allow for any concave entropy function, and its non-negativity strengthens the subadditivity condition for that entropy function. In a sense, this condition is intermediate in strength between subadditivity and strong subadditivity, hence called firm subadditivity, allowing one to further classify entropy functions based on whether they satisfy this intermediate condition. It is proven that the quadratic entropy $1-\Tr(ρ^2)$ satisfies the firm subadditivity condition, whereas some other subadditive Tsallis entropies are not firmly subadditive.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2010

Optical Polarization of $^{13}$C Nuclei in Diamond through Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers

We determine the polarization of the bulk $^{13}$C nuclear spin system in diamond produced by interaction with optically oriented nitrogen-vacancy (NV-) defect centers. $^{13}$C nuclei are polarized into the higher energy Zeeman state with a bulk-average polarization up to 5.2%, although local polarization may be higher. The kinetics of polarization are temperature independent, and occur within 5 minutes. Fluctuations in the dipolar field of the NV- center spin bath are identified as the mechanism by which nuclear spin transitions are induced near defect centers. Polarization is then transported to the bulk material via spin diffusion, which accounts for the observed kinetics of polarization. These results indicate control over the nuclear spin bath, a methodology to study dynamics of an NV- center ensemble, and application to sensitivity-enhanced NMR.

cond-mat.other↗

arXiv2008

Helicity asymmetry of optically-pumped NMR spectra in GaAs

The origin of helicity asymmetries in the optically-pumped NMR signal and hyperfine shift in GaAs is derived analytically and tested experimentally. The ratio of the optically-pumped to the equilibrium electron polarizations is a key parameter in determining both asymmetries. Variations in asymmetry with photon energy and laser power reflect variations in the local temperature and the electron spin polarization, and these two quantities are extracted from the asymmetry through a simple methodology. Other contributions to the asymmetry are considered.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗