arXiv subjects

Pavel Sekatski

Publications and source records attributed to Pavel Sekatski.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantifying the fidelity of a quantum memory

Quantum memories are key ingredients for future quantum networks. Developing methods for their certification is therefore an important, yet challenging, problem. In this work, we present a general framework for certifying quantum memories and quantifying their performance in an operational and efficient manner, taking advantage of developments in the theory of quantum channels. We start by giving a pedagogical introduction to these concepts and tools and illustrate their natural application to quantum memories. Specifically, we quantify the fidelity of a quantum memory via the notion of average channel fidelity, which can be estimated precisely in an experiment via a finite set of probe states forming a so-called $2$-design. We then present a number of witnessing techniques for certifying this quantity, and show that it gives access to other important properties of the channel, such as its dimensionality and its capacity to transmit quantum information. We consider mostly a simple prepare-and-measure scenario, but discuss also the case of an entanglement-based setup, as well as a semi-device-independent approach. Finally, we apply these methods to a solid-state quantum memory experiment, certifying an average channel fidelity of 98.6%. Our certification methods can be readily applied to other quantum devices, such as fibers, transducers and gates.

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arXiv2026

The power of quantum catalytic local operations

A key result in entanglement theory is that the addition of a catalyst dramatically enlarges the set of possible state transformations via local operations and classical communication (LOCC). However, it remains unclear what is the interplay between classical communication and quantum catalysis. Here our aim is to disentangle the effect of the catalyst from that of classical communication. To do so, we explore a class of state transformations termed catalytic local operations (CLO) and compare it to LOCC and to stochastic LOCC augmented by bounded quantum communication. We show that these classes are incomparable and capture different facets of quantum state transformations.

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arXiv2026

Catalytic Activation of Genuine Multipartite Entanglement and Nonlocality

We demonstrate the possibility to activate genuine multipartite entanglement (GME), the strongest form of entanglement for multipartite states, within the framework of quantum catalysis. Specifically, we show that any biseparable state (i.e. not GME) that is not partition separable can be deterministically transformed into a GME state via the help of a catalyst and local operations, without any classical communication. In turn, we construct a catalytic protocol tailored to the multipartite case. The protocol is termed "sum-to-product", as it transforms a mixture of states into their tensor product in a heralded manner. We apply this protocol to random network entangled states, which are biseparable by construction, and demonstrate catalytic activation of both GME and genuine multipartite Bell nonlocality.

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arXiv2026

Quantum models of interaction Hamiltonian and their paradoxes

In quantum physics it is commonplace to model the interaction of remote systems with a many-body Hamiltonian. Taking such an action-at-a-distance description {\it à la lettre} leads to various paradoxes related to faster-than-light communication and apparent inconsistencies in local energy accounting. It also neglects residual effects, such as entanglement between the remote systems and the mediator that implements the interaction, or the decoherence that arises when the remote systems undergo local evolution. We study simple microscopic quantum models that respect the light cone by design and reproduce two-body Hamiltonians. For these models we quantitatively analyze the residual effects of the microscopic mediator on the remote systems, including dressing of stationary states, and decoherence in the presence of fast local control. We show how the models resolve the paradoxes.

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arXiv2026

The entropic coherence is a necessary resource for non-energy preserving gates

We consider the task of implementing non-energy preserving gates (NEPG) on a finite-dimensional system S via an energy-preserving interaction with an external battery B. We prove that the entropic coherence of the battery (an instance of the relative entropy of resource) is a necessary resource for this task, and find a lower bound on its minimum amount that has to be present in the battery to be able to implement NEPGs with a fixed desired precision. An immediate corollary is that any finite-dimensional battery is doomed to a certain minimal error in the gate implementation task. Moreover, under assumptions on the density of energy levels in the battery Hamiltonian, our main results imply additional lower bounds on the minimal amount of energy and quantum Fisher information required to implement any gate. We show that these bounds can be stronger than the universal bounds previously established in the literature.

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arXiv2026

The bottleneck dimension of quantum operations

Programmable quantum devices nominally act on a Hilbert space whose dimension grows exponentially with the number of constituents, but the presence of noise makes it unlikely that they remain coherent across all of this immense Hilbert space. Then, what is the effective coherent quantum dimension that should be associated with such imperfect devices? To answer this question we here introduce an operational basis-independent framework which imposes a dimension bottleneck on the programmable transformations. Concretely we ask how strongly the quantum information they process can be compressed. Formalizing this idea we identify three inequivalent notions, termed $d$-compressibility, $d$-simulability and $d$-embeddability, which differ in the causal structure used to impose the bottleneck and form a strict hierarchy. The framework unifies several existing notions: joint measurability and simulability of quantum measurements, and the absolute dimensionality of state ensembles, are recovered as special cases. We illustrate the hierarchy with noisy qubit measurements in complementary bases, and we determine the white-noise thresholds at which the set of all noisy unitary channels in dimension $n$, a noisy universal quantum processor, becomes $d$-compressible, $d$-simulable and $d$-embeddable. The thresholds confirm the expectation -- maintaining coherence across the full Hilbert space becomes increasingly demanding as the nominal dimension $n$ increases.

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arXiv2026

Entanglement distribution and quantum storage of more than 8000 modes over a metropolitan network

Entanglement generation between telecommunication photons and matter is central to fibre-based quantum repeaters. Achieving practical communication rates requires multiplexing, which multimode quantum memories can provide. Rare-earth-ion ensembles offer large temporal multimode storage by exploiting the numerous spectral channels within their absorption spectrum. Here, we report on a quantum repeater node comprised of a $^{171}$Yb$^{3+}$:Y$_2$SiO$_5$ multimode quantum memory, featuring a 250 MHz bandwidth and a $76.6~μ\mathrm{s}$ lifetime, and a bandwidth-matched entangled photon-pair source. We introduce and validate a quantitative measure of the effective temporal mode capacity using a Schmidt decomposition. With this platform, we demonstrate entanglement between a telecom photon propagating through a 25.3 km fiber spool and a 979 nm photon stored for $125~μ\mathrm{s}$ across 16340 temporal modes. Finally, we report a field deployment distributing entanglement over 5.66 km through the Geneva metropolitan fibre network while storing 8235 modes for $63~μ\mathrm{s}$.

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arXiv2026

Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks: Theory, Implementations, and Applications

Artificial intelligence has been transformed by deep neural networks, yet the search for new learning architectures continues. Quantum machine learning offers one such direction, and hybrid quantum neural networks, which combine classical neural-network components with quantum information processing units, have emerged as a practical framework for near-term quantum technologies. However, the rapid development of the field across diverse architectures, benchmarks and hardware assumptions makes it difficult to assess the utility of various proposals, identify where genuine advantages may arise, and determine how practitioners can use these models. While recent benchmarks caution that such gains have not yet been demonstrated at scale, theoretical work has identified tasks on which quantum models hold provable advantages, and hybrid approaches have delivered promising results on practical problems using deliberately compact quantum components and substantially fewer trainable parameters. Here, we review hybrid quantum neural networks for the machine-learning and quantum-machine-learning communities. We summarize their main theoretical and methodological foundations, survey some of the most promising architectures developed so far, and examine their implementation challenges and reported performance. By consolidating these perspectives, this review provides a structured view of the state of the field and helps identify promising paths for future research and application-driven development.

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arXiv2026

Self-testing Quantum Supermaps

By certifying quantum operations from measurement statistics directly, without any assumption on the internal workings of the devices involved, self-testing enables a uniquely reliable identification of quantum objects. While such device-independent characterization has been shown to be possible for states, measurements and channels, it has so far not been extended to quantum supermaps -- operations that act on quantum channels themselves and can combine them in either a well-defined causal order or also, remarkably, in an indefinite causal order. Here we show that quantum supermaps can be identified device-independently. Specifically, we obtain two levels of certification, depending on the network structure of the experiment: when each slot of the supermap accepts a single uncharacterized black box, identification up to local embedding combs is obtained; when several black boxes are inserted within each slot, identification up to local extracting and injecting maps is achieved. We illustrate our approach on four examples -- the identity comb, a bit-flip error-correcting comb, the comb describing Grover's algorithm, and the quantum switch -- providing in particular the first self-test of both a quantum algorithmic comb and a causally indefinite quantum process. Notably, in the latter case, this provides a new way to certify causal indefiniteness in a device-independent manner.

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arXiv2026

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

Photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors are essential components of photonic quantum technologies, yet thus far, no practical metric exists to certify how many photons they can genuinely resolve in a single measurement. Here we introduce an operational framework for quantifying the capability of a PNR detector to distinguish between different numbers of photons, i.e. its genuine resolution. In turn, we develop a practical and scalable protocol for certifying the genuine resolution of a detector, which is based on coherent state probes. We apply the method to a 28-pixel photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (PNR-SNSPD) and certify genuine four-outcome resolution. Our work highlights the critical requirements in terms of detector efficiency towards achieving high genuine resolution. This approach provides an operational benchmark for PNR detectors and fills a crucial gap in the characterization of photonic quantum devices.

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arXiv2026

Exact requirements for battery-assisted qubit gates

We consider the implementation of a unitary gate on a qubit system S via a global energy-preserving operation acting on S and an auxiliary system B that can be seen as a battery. We derive a simple, asymptotically exact expression for the implementation error as a function of the battery state, which we refer to as the it Unitary Defect. Remarkably, this quantity is independent of the specific gate being implemented, highlighting a universal property of the battery itself. We show that minimizing the unitary defect, under given physical constraints on the battery state, is mathematically equivalent to solving a Lagrangian optimization problem, often corresponding to finding the ground state of a one-dimensional quantum system. Using this mapping, we identify optimal battery states that achieve the highest precision under constraints on energy, squared energy, number of levels and Quantum Fisher Information. Overall, our results provide an efficient method for establishing bounds on the physical requirements needed to implement a unitary gate via energy-preserving operations and for determining the corresponding optimal protocols.

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arXiv2026

Superactivation of genuine multipartite Bell nonlocality from two-party entanglement

Characterizing the relation between entanglement and Bell nonlocality is a long-standing open problem, notably challenging in the multipartite case. Here we investigate the effect of superactivation of genuine multipartite nonlocality. Specifically, we show that starting from multipartite states that feature only two-party entanglement (hence almost fully separable), it is possible to obtain GMNL in the many-copy regime. This represents the weakest possible resource for GMNL superactivation. On the technical side, we develop an efficient and practical criterion for certifying GMNL superactivation based on network entangled states, as well as a perfect parallel repetition result for the Khot-Vishnoi Bell game, which are of independent interest.

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arXiv2026

Quantum sensing of a quantum field

Estimating a classical parameter encoded in the Hamiltonian of a quantum probe is a fundamental and well-understood task in quantum metrology. A textbook example is the estimation of a classical field's amplitude using a two-level probe, as described by the semi-classical Rabi model. In this work, we explore the fully quantum analogue, where the amplitude of a coherent quantized field is estimated by letting it interact with a two-level atom. For both metrological scenarios, we focus on the quantum Fisher information (QFI) of the reduced state of the atomic probe. In the semi-classical Rabi model, the QFI is independent of the field amplitude and grows quadratically with the interaction time $τ$. In contrast, when the atom interacts with a single coherent mode of the field, the QFI is bounded by 4, a constant dictated by the non-orthogonality of coherent states. We find that this bound can only be approached in the vacuum limit. In the limit of large amplitude $α$, the QFI is found to attain its maximal value $1.47$ at $τ=O(1)$ and $τ=O(α^2)$, and also shows periodic revivals at much later times. When the atom interacts with a sequence of coherent states, the QFI can increase with time but is bounded to scale linearly due to the production of entanglement between the atom and the radiation (back-action), except in the limit where the number of modes and their total energy diverge. Finally, in the continuous-field limit, where the atom interacts with a continuous source of weak coherent states, this back-action can be simply interpreted as spontaneous emission; we find that the optimal atomic QFI rate is finite, depends on the source intensity, and is upper bounded by the constant rate at which the QFI is emitted by the radiation source.

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arXiv2026

Catalytic Activation of Bell Nonlocality

The correlations of certain entangled states can be perfectly simulated classically via a local model. Hence such states are termed Bell local, as they cannot lead to Bell inequality violation. Here, we show that Bell nonlocality can nevertheless be activated for certain Bell-local states via a catalytic process. Specifically, we present a protocol where a Bell-local state, combined with a catalyst, is transformed into a Bell-nonlocal state while the catalyst is returned exactly in its initial state. Importantly, this transformation is deterministic and based only on local operations. Moreover, this procedure is possible even when the state of the catalyst is itself Bell local, demonstrating a new form of superactivation of Bell nonlocality, as well as an interesting form of quantum catalysis. On the technical level, our main tool is a formal connection between catalytic activation and many-copy activation.

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arXiv2025

All Entangled States are Nonlocal and Self-Testable in the Broadcast Scenario

Entanglement and Bell nonlocality are known to be inequivalent: there exist entangled states that admit a local hidden-variable model for all local measurements. Here we show that this gap disappears in a minimal broadcast extension of the Bell scenario. Assuming only the validity of quantum theory, we prove that for every entangled state $ρ_{AB}$ there exist local broadcasting maps and local measurements such that the resulting four--partite correlations cannot be reproduced by any broadcast network whose source is separable across the $A|B$ cut. Thus, all entangled states are broadcast nonlocal in quantum theory. In addition, we show that all (also mixed) multipartite states can be broadcast-self-tested, according to a natural operational definition.

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arXiv2025

Partial independence suffices to rule out Real Quantum Theory experimentally

The role of complex quantities in quantum theory has been puzzling physicists since the beginnings. It is thus natural to ask whether, in order to describe our experiments, the mathematical structure of complex Hilbert spaces it is built on is really necessary. Recently, it was shown that this structure is inevitable in network scenarios with independent sources. More precisely, Real Quantum Theory cannot explain the predictions of (Complex) Quantum Theory [Renou et al., Nature 600, 2021]. Here, we revisit the independence assumption underlying this work. We show that assuming partial independence is sufficient for showing the inadequacy of Real Quantum Theory. We derive a tradeoff between source independence and the Bell value achievable in Real Quantum Theory, which also lower bounds the source correlations required to explain previous experiments by means of real quantum systems. We further show that 1 bit of entanglement is necessary and sufficient for recovering the complex quantum correlations by means of Real Quantum Theory in the scenario from [Renou et al., Nature 600, 2021]. Finally, building on [McKague et al., PRL 102, 2009], we provide a construction to simulate any complex quantum setup with m independent sources by means of Real Quantum Theory, by allowing the sources to share a m real-qubit entangled state in the first round of the experiment.

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arXiv2025

Cloning Quantum Channels

We consider the problem of deterministically cloning quantum channels with respect to the best attainable rate and the highest quality, so-called optimal cloning. We demonstrate that cloning quantum states is, in-fact, equivalent to cloning the trash-and-replace channel and therefore the former is a special case of the more general problem. By appealing to higher-order quantum operations (quantum processes) we construct a unified framework to deal with the most general cloning tasks and establish necessary conditions for a family of channels to exhibit super-replication -- a quadratic cloning rate with vanishing error. We find that noisy phase-gate channels satisfy these conditions, and we construct the explicit super-replicating process for the task. Conversely, we find that the criteria are not met by the full set of noisy unitary gates; classical noise channels; or amplitude damping channels, whose respective cloning rates are at most linear. In this paradigm, we not only derive new results, but also refigure known ones. We derive a strong converse for state cloning, and for unitary channels we construct an alternative super-replication process to that of Dür et al. [PRL 114, 120503 (2015)] and Chiribella et al. [PRL 114, 120504 (2015)] based on a measure-and-prepare process, which allows us to establish a direct connection between optimal channel cloning and Bayesian channel estimation. Finally we give an SDP algorithm to search for optimal cloning processes and study the advantage of coherent vs measure-and-prepare protocols on concrete examples.

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arXiv2025

Noise-robust proofs of quantum network nonlocality

Quantum networks allow for novel forms of quantum nonlocality. By exploiting the combination of entangled states and entangled measurements, strong nonlocal correlations can be generated across the entire network. So far, all proofs of this effect are essentially restricted to the idealized case of pure entangled states and projective local measurements. Here we present noise-robust proofs of network quantum nonlocality, for a class of quantum distributions on the triangle network that are based on entangled states and entangled measurements. The key ingredient is a result of approximate rigidity for local distributions that satisfy the so-called ``parity token counting'' property with high probability. Our methods can be applied to any type of noise. As illustrative examples, we consider quantum distributions obtained with imperfect sources and obtain a noise robustness up to $\sim 80\%$ for dephasing noise and up to $\sim 0.5\%$ for white noise. Additionally, we prove that all distributions in the vicinity of some ideal quantum distribution are nonlocal, with a bound on the total-variation distance $\sim 0.25\%$. Our work opens interesting perspectives towards the practical implementation of quantum network nonlocality.

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