Experimental demonstration of entanglement-enabled universal quantum cloning in a circuit

No-cloning theorem forbids perfect cloning of an unknown quantum state. A universal quantum cloning machine (UQCM), capable of producing two copies of any input qubit with the optimal fidelity, is of fundamental interest and has applications in quantum information processing. This is enabled by delicately tailored nonclassical correlations between the input qubit and the copying qubits, which distinguish the UQCM from a classical counterpart, but whose experimental demonstrations are still lacking. We here implement the UQCM in a superconducting circuit and investigate these correlations. The measured entanglements well agree with our theoretical prediction that they are independent of the input state and thus constitute a universal quantum behavior of the UQCM that was not previously revealed. Another feature of our experiment is the realization of deterministic and individual cloning, in contrast to previously demonstrated UQCMs, which either were probabilistic or did not constitute true cloning of individual qubits.

Twenty Years of Quantum State Teleportation at the Sapienza University in Rome

Quantum teleportation is one of the most striking consequence of quantum mechanics and is defined as the transmission and reconstruction of an unknown quantum state over arbitrary distances. This concept was introduced for the first time in 1993 by Charles Bennett and coworkers, it has then been experimentally demonstrated by several groups under different conditions of distance, amount of particles and even with feed forward. After 20 years from its first realization, this contribution reviews the experimental implementations realized at the Quantum Optics Group of the University of Rome La Sapienza.

Deterministic quantum teleportation through fiber channels

Quantum teleportation, which is the transfer of an unknown quantum state from one station to another over a certain distance with the help of nonlocal entanglement shared by a sender and a receiver, has been widely used as a fundamental element in quantum communication and quantum computation. Optical fibers are crucial information channels, but teleportation of continuous variable optical modes through fibers has not been realized so far. Here, we experimentally demonstrate deterministic quantum teleportation of an optical coherent state through fiber channels. Two sub-modes of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entangled state are distributed to a sender and a receiver through a 3.0-km fiber, which acts as a quantum resource. The deterministic teleportation of optical modes over a fiber channel of 6.0 km is realized. A fidelity of 0.62 ± 0.03 is achieved for the retrieved quantum state, which breaks through the classical limit of1/2. Our work provides a feasible scheme to implement deterministic quantum teleportation in communication networks.

Information Geometry of Randomized Quantum State Tomography

Suppose that a d-dimensional Hilbert space H ≃ C d admits a full set of mutually unbiased bases | 1 ( a ) 〉 , ⋯ , | d ( a ) 〉 , where a = 1 , ⋯ , d + 1 . A randomized quantum state tomography is a scheme for estimating an unknown quantum state on H through iterative applications of measurements M ( a ) = | 1 ( a ) 〉 〈 1 ( a ) | , ⋯ , | d ( a ) 〉 〈 d ( a ) | for a = 1 , ⋯ , d + 1 , where the numbers of applications of these measurements are random variables. We show that the space of the resulting probability distributions enjoys a mutually orthogonal dualistic foliation structure, which provides us with a simple geometrical insight into the maximum likelihood method for the quantum state tomography.

Practical quantum teleportation of an unknown quantum state

We present our model to teleport an unknown quantum state using entanglement between two distant parties. Our model takes into account experimental limitations due to contribution of multi-photon pair production of parametric down conversion source, inefficiency, dark counts of detectors, and channel losses. We use a linear optics setup for quantum teleportation of an unknown quantum state by the sender performing a Bell state measurement. Our theory successfully provides a model for experimentalists to optimize the fidelity by adjusting the experimental parameters. We apply our model to a recent experiment on quantum teleportation and the results obtained by our model are in good agreement with the experimental results.

Crystallizing highly-likely subspaces that contain an unknown quantum state of light

In continuous-variable tomography, with finite data and limited computation resources, reconstruction of a quantum state of light is performed on a finite-dimensional subspace. In principle, the data themselves encode all information about the relevant subspace that physically contains the state. We provide a straightforward and numerically feasible procedure to uniquely determine the appropriate reconstruction subspace by extracting this information directly from the data for any given unknown quantum state of light and measurement scheme. This procedure makes use of the celebrated statistical principle of maximum likelihood, along with other validation tools, to grow an appropriate seed subspace into the optimal reconstruction subspace, much like the nucleation of a seed into a crystal. Apart from using the available measurement data, no other assumptions about the source or preconceived parametric model subspaces are invoked. This ensures that no spurious reconstruction artifacts are present in state reconstruction as a result of inappropriate choices of the reconstruction subspace. The procedure can be understood as the maximum-likelihood reconstruction for quantum subspaces, which is an analog to, and fully compatible with that for quantum states.

Selfcomplementary Quantum Channels

Selfcomplementary quantum channels are characterized by such an interaction between the principal quantum system and the environment that leads to the same output states of both interacting systems. These maps can describe approximate quantum copy machines, as perfect copying of an unknown quantum state is not possible due to the celebrated no-cloning theorem. We provide here a parametrization of a large class of selfcomplementary channels and analyze their properties. Selfcomplementary channels preserve some residual coherences and residual entanglement. Investigating some measures of non-Markovianity, we show that time evolution under selfcomplementary channels is highly non-Markovian.

Optimal universal quantum cloning: asymmetries and fidelity measures

We study the problem of universal quantum cloning – taking several identical copies of a pure but unknown quantum state and producing further copies. While it is well known that it is impossible to perfectly reproduce the state, how well the copies can be cloned can be quantified using the fidelity. We examine how individual fidelities can be traded against each other, and how different fidelity measures can be incorporated. The broadly applicable formalism into which we transform the cloning problem is described as a series of quadratic constraints which are amenable to mathematical and computational scrutiny. As such, we reproduce all known results on optimal universal cloning, and push the recent results on asymmetric cloning much further, giving new trade-off relations between fidelities for broad classes of optimal cloning machines. We also provide substantial evidence that motivates why other parameter ranges (number of input copies) have not, and will not, yield to similar analysis.