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Richard Gill

Publications and source records attributed to Richard Gill.

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Tomography and state reconstruction with superconducting single-photon detectors

We perform quantum state reconstruction of coherent and thermal states with a detector which has an enhanced multiphoton response. The detector is based on superconducting nanowires, where the bias current sets the dependence of the click probability on the photon number; this bias current is used as tuning parameter in the state reconstruction. The nonlinear response makes our nanowire-based detector superior to the linear detectors that are conventionally used for quantum state reconstruction.

quant-ph

On the (ab)use of statistics in the legal case against the nurse Lucia de B

We discuss the statistics involved in the legal case of the nurse Lucia de B. in The Netherlands, 2003-2004. Lucia de B. witnessed an unusually high number of incidents during her shifts, and the question arose as to whether this could be attributed to chance. We discuss and criticise the statistical analysis of Henk Elffers, a statistician who was asked by the prosecutor to write a statistical report on the issue. We discuss several other possibilities for statistical analysis. Our main point is that several statistical models exist, leading to very different predictions, or perhaps different answers to different questions. There is no such thing as a `best' statistical analysis.

math.ST

Optimal Bell tests do not require maximally entangled states

Any Bell test consists of a sequence of measurements on a quantum state in space-like separated regions. Thus, a state is better than others for a Bell test when, for the optimal measurements and the same number of trials, the probability of existence of a local model for the observed outcomes is smaller. The maximization over states and measurements defines the optimal nonlocality proof. Numerical results show that the required optimal state does not have to be maximally entangled.

quant-ph

Bell's inequality and the coincidence-time loophole

This paper analyzes effects of time-dependence in the Bell inequality. A generalized inequality is derived for the case when coincidence and non-coincidence [and hence whether or not a pair contributes to the actual data] is controlled by timing that depends on the detector settings. Needless to say, this inequality is violated by quantum mechanics and could be violated by experimental data provided that the loss of measurement pairs through failure of coincidence is small enough, but the quantitative bound is more restrictive in this case than in the previously analyzed "efficiency loophole."

quant-ph

The statistical strength of nonlocality proofs

There exist numerous proofs of Bell's theorem, stating that quantum mechanics is incompatible with local realistic theories of nature. Here we define the strength of such nonlocality proofs in terms of the amount of evidence against local realism provided by the corresponding experiments. This measure tells us how many trials of the experiment we should perform in order to observe a substantial violation of local realism. Statistical considerations show that the amount of evidence should be measured by the Kullback-Leibler or relative entropy divergence between the probability distributions over the measurement outcomes that the respective theories predict. The statistical strength of a nonlocality proof is thus determined by the experimental implementation of it that maximizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence from experimental (quantum mechanical) truth to the set of all possible local theories. An implementation includes a specification with which probabilities the different measurement settings are sampled, and hence the maximization is done over all such setting distributions. We analyze two versions of Bell's nonlocality proof (his original proof and an optimized version by Peres), and proofs by Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt, Hardy, Mermin, and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger. We find that the GHZ proof is at least four and a half times stronger than all other proofs, while of the two-party proofs, the one of CHSH is the strongest.

quant-ph

An invitation to quantum tomography

We describe quantum tomography as an inverse statistical problem and show how entropy methods can be used to study the behaviour of sieved maximum likelihood estimators. There remain many open problems, and a main purpose of the paper is to bring these to the attention of the statistical community.

quant-ph