arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Paul A. Lopata.
A method is given to detect the presence of eavesdroppers when a noisy message is sent to a privileged receiver. A proof of the effectiveness if this method is demonstrated, and a comparison is made to other quantum cryptographic tasks.
We investigate the dependence of the fidelity of a Mach-Zehnder quantum interferometer on the prior information about the phase, for Fock state input and for maximally entangled (N00N) state input. For no prior information, the fidelity for Fock state input is greater than for N00N state input. In the limit of a narrow distribution describing the prior information, we find that both Fock and N00N state inputs lead to nearly equal fidelity.
A communication protocol is introduced that allows the receiver of a message to place an a posteriori bound on the amount of information that an eavesdropper could have obtained during transmission of that message. This quantum cryptographic protocol is distinct from quantum key distribution. The quantum states and measurements required by this protocol are simple enough that it can be implemented using existing technology.
For a generic interferometer, the conditional probability density distribution, $p(ϕ|m)$, for the phase $ϕ$ given measurement outcome $m$, will generally have multiple peaks. Therefore, the phase sensitivity of an interferometer cannot be adequately characterized by the standard deviation, such as $Δϕ\sim 1/\sqrt{N}$ (the standard limit), or $Δϕ\sim 1/N$ (the Heisenberg limit). We propose an alternative measure of phase sensitivity--the fidelity of an interferometer--defined as the Shannon mutual information between the phase shift $ϕ$\ and the measurement outcomes $m$. As an example application of interferometer fidelity, we consider a generic optical Mach-Zehnder interferometer, used as a sensor of a classical field. We find the surprising result that an entangled {\it N00N} state input leads to a lower fidelity than a Fock state input, for the same photon number.