arXiv subjects

Pavel Sekatski

Publications and source records attributed to Pavel Sekatski.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Entanglement purification by counting and locating errors with entangling measurements

We consider entanglement purification protocols for multiple copies of qubit states. We use high-dimensional auxiliary entangled systems to learn about number and positions of errors in the noisy ensemble in an explicit and controlled way, thereby reducing the amount of noise in the ensemble and purifying the remaining states. This allows us to design entanglement purification protocols for any number of copies that work particularly well for a small number of expected errors, i.e. high fidelity of initial states. The main tool is a counter gate with which the required non-local information can be transferred into the high-dimensional entangled qudit auxiliary states. We compare our schemes to standard recurrence protocols that operate on pairs of copies, and hashing and breeding protocols that operate on a (asymptotically) large number of copies. Our protocols interpolate between these two regimes, leading to a higher achievable fidelity and yield. We illustrate our approach for bipartite qubit states, and generalize it to purify multi-party GHZ states.

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arXiv2021

Entanglement-assisted entanglement purification

The efficient generation of high-fidelity entangled states is the key element for long-distance quantum communication, quantum computation and other quantum technologies, and at the same time the most resource-consuming part in many schemes. We present a new class of entanglement-assisted entanglement purification protocols that can generate high-fidelity entanglement from noisy, finite-size ensembles with improved yield and fidelity as compared to previous approaches. The scheme utilizes high-dimensional auxiliary entanglement to perform entangling non-local measurements and determine the number and positions of errors in an ensemble in a controlled and efficient way, without disturbing the entanglement of good pairs. Our protocols can deal with arbitrary errors, but are best suited for few errors, and work particularly well for decay noise. Our methods are applicable to moderate sized ensembles, as will be important for near term quantum devices.

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arXiv2021

Approximate decoherence free subspaces for distributed sensing

We consider the sensing of scalar valued fields with specific spatial dependence using a network of sensors, e.g. multiple atoms located at different positions within a trap. We show how to harness the spatial correlations to sense only a specific signal, and be insensitive to others at different positions or with unequal spatial dependence by constructing a decoherence-free subspace for noise sources at fixed, known positions. This can be extended to noise sources lying on certain surfaces, where we encounter a connection to mirror charges and equipotential surfaces in classical electrostatics. For general situations, we introduce the notion of an approximate decoherence-free subspace, where noise for all sources within some volume is significantly suppressed, at the cost of reducing the signal strength in a controlled way. We show that one can use this approach to maintain Heisenberg-scaling over long times and for a large number of sensors, despite the presence of multiple noise sources in large volumes. We introduce an efficient formalism to construct internal states and sensor configurations, and apply it to several examples to demonstrate the usefulness and wide applicability of our approach.

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arXiv2021

Control of Stochastic Quantum Dynamics by Differentiable Programming

Control of the stochastic dynamics of a quantum system is indispensable in fields such as quantum information processing and metrology. However, there is no general ready-made approach to the design of efficient control strategies. Here, we propose a framework for the automated design of control schemes based on differentiable programming ($\partial \mathrm{P}$). We apply this approach to the state preparation and stabilization of a qubit subjected to homodyne detection. To this end, we formulate the control task as an optimization problem where the loss function quantifies the distance from the target state, and we employ neural networks (NNs) as controllers. The system's time evolution is governed by a stochastic differential equation (SDE). To implement efficient training, we backpropagate the gradient information from the loss function through the SDE solver using adjoint sensitivity methods. As a first example, we feed the quantum state to the controller and focus on different methods of obtaining gradients. As a second example, we directly feed the homodyne detection signal to the controller. The instantaneous value of the homodyne current contains only very limited information on the actual state of the system, masked by unavoidable photon-number fluctuations. Despite the resulting poor signal-to-noise ratio, we can train our controller to prepare and stabilize the qubit to a target state with a mean fidelity of around 85%. We also compare the solutions found by the NN to a hand-crafted control strategy.

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arXiv2021

Self-testing two-qubit maximally entangled states from generalized CHSH tests

Device-independent certification, also known as self-testing, aims at guaranteeing the proper functioning of untrusted and uncharacterized devices. For example, the quality of an unknown source expected to produce two-qubit maximally entangled states can be evaluated in a bi-partite scenario, each party using two binary measurements. The most robust approach consists in deducing the fidelity of produced states with respect to a two-qubit maximally entangled state from the violation of the CHSH inequality. In this paper, we show how the self-testing of two-qubit maximally entangled states is improved by a refined analysis of measurement statistics. The use of suitably chosen Bell tests, depending on the observed correlations, allows one to conclude higher fidelities than ones previously known. In particular, nontrivial self-testing statements can be obtained from correlations that cannot be exploited by a CHSH-based self-testing strategy. Our results not only provide novel insight into the set of quantum correlations suited for self-testing, but also facilitate the experimental implementations of device-independent certifications.

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arXiv2021

Self-testing with finite statistics enabling the certification of a quantum network link

Self-testing is a method to certify devices from the result of a Bell test. Although examples of noise tolerant self-testing are known, it is not clear how to deal efficiently with a finite number of experimental trials to certify the average quality of a device without assuming that it behaves identically at each run. As a result, existing self-testing results with finite statistics have been limited to guarantee the proper working of a device in just one of all experimental trials, thereby limiting their practical applicability. We here derive a method to certify through self-testing that a device produces states on average close to a Bell state without assumption on the actual state at each run. Thus the method is free of the I.I.D. (independent and identically distributed) assumption. Applying this new analysis on the data from a recent loophole-free Bell experiment, we demonstrate the successful distribution of Bell states over 398 meters with an average fidelity of $\geq$55.50% at a confidence level of 99%. Being based on a Bell test free of detection and locality loopholes, our certification is evidently device-independent, that is, it does not rely on trust in the devices or knowledge of how the devices work. This guarantees that our link can be integrated in a quantum network for performing long-distance quantum communications with security guarantees that are independent of the details of the actual implementation.

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arXiv2020

Heralded distribution of single-photon path entanglement

We report the experimental realization of heralded distribution of single-photon path entanglement at telecommunication wavelengths in a repeater-like architecture. The entanglement is established upon detection of a single photon, originating from one of two spontaneous parametric down conversion photon pair sources, after erasing the photon's which-path information. In order to certify the entanglement, we use an entanglement witness which does not rely on post-selection. We herald entanglement between two locations, separated by a total distance of 2 km of optical fiber, at a rate of 1.6 kHz. This work paves the way towards high-rate and practical quantum repeater architectures.

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arXiv2020

Setting up experimental Bell test with reinforcement learning

Finding optical setups producing measurement results with a targeted probability distribution is hard as a priori the number of possible experimental implementations grows exponentially with the number of modes and the number of devices. To tackle this complexity, we introduce a method combining reinforcement learning and simulated annealing enabling the automated design of optical experiments producing results with the desired probability distributions. We illustrate the relevance of our method by applying it to a probability distribution favouring high violations of the Bell-CHSH inequality. As a result, we propose new unintuitive experiments leading to higher Bell-CHSH inequality violations than the best currently known setups. Our method might positively impact the usefulness of photonic experiments for device-independent quantum information processing.

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arXiv2020

Device-independent characterization of quantum instruments

Among certification techniques, those based on the violation of Bell inequalities are appealing because they do not require assumptions on the underlying Hilbert space dimension and on the accuracy of calibration methods. Such device-independent techniques have been proposed to certify the quality of entangled states, unitary operations, projective measurements following von Neumann's model and rank-one positive-operator-valued measures (POVM). Here, we show that they can be extended to the characterization of quantum instruments with post-measurement states that are not fully determined by the Kraus operators but also depend on input states. We provide concrete certification recipes that are robust to noise.

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arXiv2020

What is the minimum CHSH score certifying that a state resembles the singlet?

A quantum state can be characterized from the violation of a Bell inequality. The well-known CHSH inequality for example can be used to quantify the fidelity (up to local isometries) of the measured state with respect to the singlet state. In this work, we look for the minimum CHSH violation leading to a non-trivial fidelity. In particular, we provide a new analytical approach to explore this problem in a device-independent framework, where the fidelity bound holds without assumption about the internal working of devices used in the CHSH test. We give an example which pushes the minimum CHSH threshold from $\approx2.0014$ to $\approx2.05,$ far from the local bound. This is in sharp contrast with the device-dependent (two-qubit) case, where entanglement is one-to-one related to a non-trivial singlet fidelity. We discuss this result in a broad context including device-dependent/independent state characterizations with various classical resources.

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arXiv2020

How post-selection affects device-independent claims under the fair sampling assumption

Device-independent certifications employ Bell tests to guarantee the proper functioning of an apparatus from the sole knowledge of observed measurement statistics, i.e. without assumptions on the internal functioning of the devices. When these Bell tests are implemented with devices having too low efficiency, one has to post-select the events that lead to successful detections and thus rely on a fair sampling assumption. The question that we address in this paper is what remains of a device-independent certification under fair sampling. We provide an intuitive description of post-selections in terms of filters and define the fair sampling assumption as a property of these filters, equivalent to the definition introduced in [Berry et. al., PRA 81(1), 012109 (2010)]. When this assumption is fulfilled, the post-selected data is reproduced by an ideal experiment where lossless devices measure a filtered state which can be obtained from the actual state via local probabilistic maps. Trusted conclusions can thus be obtained on the quantum properties of this filtered state and the corresponding measurement statistics can reliably be used, e.g., for randomness generation or quantum key distribution. We also explore a stronger notion of fair sampling leading to the conclusion that the post-selected data is a fair representation of the data that would be obtained with lossless detections. Furthermore, we show that our conclusions hold in cases of small deviations from exact fair sampling. Finally, we describe setups previously or potentially used in Bell-type experiments under fair sampling and identify the underlying device-specific assumptions.

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arXiv2019

Optimal distributed sensing in noisy environments

We consider distributed sensing of non-local quantities. We introduce quantum enhanced protocols to directly measure any (scalar) field with a specific spatial dependence by placing sensors at appropriate positions and preparing a spatially distributed entangled quantum state. Our scheme has optimal Heisenberg scaling and is completely unaffected by noise on other processes with different spatial dependence than the signal. We consider both Fisher and Bayesian scenarios, and design states and settings to achieve optimal scaling. We explicitly demonstrate how to measure coefficients of spatial Taylor and Fourier series, and show that our approach can offer an exponential advantage as compared to strategies that do not make use of entanglement between different sites.

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arXiv2019

All macroscopic quantum states are fragile and hard to prepare

We study the effect of local decoherence on arbitrary quantum states. Adapting techniques developed in quantum metrology, we show that the action of generic local noise processes -- though arbitrarily small -- always yields a state whose Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) with respect to local observables is linear in system size N, independent of the initial state. This implies that all macroscopic quantum states, which are characterized by a QFI that is quadratic in N, are fragile under decoherence, and cannot be maintained if the system is not perfectly isolated. We also provide analytical bounds on the effective system size, and show that the effective system size scales as the inverse of the noise parameter p for small p for all the noise channels considered, making it increasingly difficult to generate macroscopic or even mesoscopic quantum states. In turn, we also show that the preparation of a macroscopic quantum state, with respect to a conserved quantity, requires a device whose QFI is already at least as large as the one of the desired state. Given that the preparation device itself is classical and not a perfectly isolated macroscopic quantum state, the preparation device needs to be quadratically bigger than the macroscopic target state.

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arXiv2018

A gated quantum dot far in the strong-coupling regime of cavity-QED at optical frequencies

The strong-coupling regime of cavity-quantum-electrodynamics (cQED) represents light-matter interaction at the fully quantum level. Adding a single photon shifts the resonance frequencies, a profound nonlinearity. cQED is a test-bed of quantum optics and the basis of photon-photon and atom-atom entangling gates. At microwave frequencies, success in cQED has had a transformative effect. At optical frequencies, the gates are potentially much faster and the photons can propagate over long distances and be easily detected, ideal features for quantum networks. Following pioneering work on single atoms, solid-state implementations are important for developing practicable quantum technology. Here, we embed a semiconductor quantum dot in a microcavity. The microcavity has a $\mathcal{Q}$-factor close to $10^{6}$ and contains a charge-tunable quantum dot with close-to-transform-limited optical linewidth. The exciton-photon coupling rate $g$ exceeds both the photon decay rate $κ$ and exciton decay rate $γ$ by a large margin ($g/γ=14$, $g/κ=5.3$); the cooperativity is $C=2g^{2}/(γκ)=150$, the $β$-factor 99.7%. We observe pronounced vacuum Rabi oscillations in the time-domain, photon blockade at a one-photon resonance, and highly bunched photon statistics at a two-photon resonance. We use the change in photon statistics as a sensitive spectral probe of transitions between the first and second rungs of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder. All experiments can be described quantitatively with the Jaynes-Cummings model despite the complexity of the solid-state environment. We propose this system as a platform to develop optical-cQED for quantum technology, for instance a photon-photon entangling gate.

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arXiv2018

Bipartite nonlocality with a many-body system

We consider a bipartite scenario where two parties hold ensembles of $1/2$-spins which can only be measured collectively. We give numerical arguments supporting the conjecture that in this scenario no Bell inequality can be violated for arbitrary numbers of spins if only first order moment observables are available. We then give a recipe to achieve a significant Bell violation with a split many-body system when this restriction is lifted. This highlights the strong requirements needed to detect bipartite quantum correlations in many-body systems device-independently.

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arXiv2018

Noise-resistant device-independent certification of Bell state measurements

Device-independent certification refers to the characterization of an apparatus without reference to the internal description of other devices. It is a trustworthy certification method, free of assumption on the underlying Hilbert space dimension and on calibration methods. We show how it can be used to quantify the quality of a Bell state measurement, whether deterministic, partial or probabilistic. Our certification is noise resistant and opens the way towards the device-independent self-testing of Bell state measurements in existing experiments.

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arXiv2018

Macroscopic quantum states: measures, fragility and implementations

Large-scale quantum effects have always played an important role in the foundations of quantum theory. With recent experimental progress and the aspiration for quantum enhanced applications, the interest in macroscopic quantum effects has been reinforced. In this review, we critically analyze and discuss measures aiming to quantify various aspects of macroscopic quantumness. We survey recent results on the difficulties and prospects to create, maintain and detect macroscopic quantum states. The role of macroscopic quantum states in foundational questions as well as practical applications is outlined. Finally, we present past and on-going experimental advances aiming to generate and observe macroscopic quantum states.

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arXiv2018

Certifying the building blocks of quantum computers from Bell's theorem

The power of quantum computers relies on the capability of their components to maintain faithfully and process accurately quantum information. Since this property eludes classical certification methods, fundamentally new protocols are required to guarantee that elementary components are suitable for quantum computation. These protocols must be device-independent, that is, they cannot rely on a particular physical description of the actual implementation if one is to qualify a block for all possible usages. Bell's theorem has been proposed to certify, in a device-independent way, blocks either producing or measuring quantum states. In this manuscript, we provide the missing piece: a method based on Bell's theorem to certify coherent operations such as storage, processing and transfer of quantum information. This completes the set of tools needed to certify all building blocks of a quantum computer. Our method is robust to experimental imperfections, and so can be readily used to certify that today's quantum devices are qualified for usage in future quantum computers.

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