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We experimentally observed optical precursors in optically pumped crystals using polarization-based interference. By switching the user-programmable médium among the fast light, slow light, and no-dispersion regimes, we observed an unchanged polarization state for the wave fronts. The robust polarization-encoded information carried by wave fronts suggests that precursors are the preferred carriers for both quantum and classical information in communication networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the quantum correlation of the photon pairs generated by biexciton cascade decays of self-assembled quantum dots, and determined the correlation sudden-change temperature, which is shown to be independent of the background noise, far lower than the entanglement sudden-death temperature, and therefore, easier to be observed in experiments. The relationship between the fine-structure splitting and the sudden-change temperature is also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precursors can serve as a bound on the speed of information with dispersive medium. We propose a method to identify the speed of optical wave fronts using polarization-based interference in a solid-state device, which can bound the accuracy of the speed of wave fronts to less than 10-4 with conventional experimental conditions. Our proposal may have important implications for optical communications and fast information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System-environment correlations, which determine the (non-)Markovian character of a dynamical process, is an area of intense interest in the study of open quantum systems. We send photons emitted from a quantum dot sample into a 15-m polarization-maintaining optical fiber to generate different system-environment correlated states and then witness the correlations by observing the growth of trace distances. This experimental scheme of correlation witnessing based on system-environment information flow can also be used for other similar systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An improvement of the scheme by Brunner and Simon [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 010405 (2010)] is proposed in order to show that quantum weak measurements can provide a method to detect ultrasmall longitudinal phase shifts, even with white light. By performing an analysis in the frequency domain, we find that the amplification effect will work as long as the spectrum is large enough, irrespective of the behavior in the time domain. As such, the previous scheme can be notably simplified for experimental implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bohr's principle of complementarity (BPC) is the cornerstone of quantum mechanics. According to this principle, the total wavelike and particlelike information of a particle is limited by the Englert-Greenberger (EG) duality relation. Here, by introducing a quantum detecting device into the experiment, we find that the limit of the EG duality relation is exceeded because of the interference between the wave and particle properties of the photon. A generalized EG duality relation is further developed. Our work provides a generalization of BPC and gives new insights into quantum mechanics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter (FADOF) based on a rare-earth ion doped crystal. We present theoretical analyses for the solid-state FADOF transmission. Our theoretical model predicts a maximum transmission efficiency of 71% and a double-peaked transmission spectrum with a bandwidth of 6 GHz under current experimental conditions. Our proposal may have important applications in optical communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate experimentally the nonlocal reversal of a partial-collapse quantum measurement of a two-photon entangled state. Both the partial-collapse measurement and the reversal operation are implemented in linear optics with two displaced Sagnac interferometers, characterized by single-qubit quantum-process tomography. The recovered state is measured by quantum-state tomography, and its nonlocality is characterized by testing the Bell inequality. Our result will be helpful in quantum communication and quantum error correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a dark-state cooling method of trapped ion systems in the Lamb-Dicke limit. By microwave dressing the ion, we can obtain two electromagnetically induced transparency structures. The heating effects caused by the carrier and the blue sideband transition vanish due to electromagnetically induced transparency effects and the final mean phonon numbers can be much lower than the recoil limit. Our scheme is robust to fluctuations of microwave power and laser intensities, which provides a broad cooling bandwidth to cool motional modes of a linear ion chain. Moreover, it is more suitable to cool four-level ions on a large-scale ion chip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report an experimental implementation of a single-qubit generalized measurement scenario, the positive-operator valued measure (POVM), based on a quantum walk model. The qubit is encoded in a single-photon polarization. The photon performs a quantum walk on an array of optical elements, where the polarization-dependent translation is performed via birefringent beam displacers and a change of the polarization is implemented with the help of wave plates. We implement: (i) trine POVM,i.e., the POVM elements uniformly distributed on an equatorial plane of the Bloch sphere; (ii) symmetric-informationally-complete (SIC) POVM; and (iii) unambiguous discrimination of two nonorthogonal qubit states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to reach a maximally entangled state from a separable one through the use of a two-qubit unitary operator is analyzed for mixed states. This extension from the known case of pure states shows that there are at least two families of gates which are able to give maximum entangling power for all values of purity. It is notable that one of this gates coincides with a maximum discording one. We give analytical proof that such gate is indeed a perfect entangler at all purities and give numerical evidence for the existence of the second one. Furthermore, we find that there are other gates, many in fact, which are perfect entanglers for a restricted range of purities. This highlights the fact that many perfect entangler gates could in principle be found if a thorough analysis of the full parameter space is performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fine-structure splitting of the exciton energy levels in a quantum dot introduces an energy difference between the two biexciton decay paths. This energy difference greatly reduces the entanglement of the photon pairs generated via biexciton recombination. Here, we propose a feasible method to eliminate the "which-path" information by using a fast frequency down-conversion technique, which substantially improves the entanglement of the photon pairs. Moreover, the wavelengths of both of the entangled photons can be transferred to the telecommunication band, which makes this method further appropriate for quantum communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The well-known Simpson's paradox, or Yule-Simpson (YS) effect, is often encountered in social-science and medical-science statistics. It occurs when the correlations present in different groups are reversed if the groups are combined. Simpson's paradox also exists in quantum measurements. In this Brief Report, we experimentally realized two analogous effects: the quantum-classical YS effect and the quantum-quantum YS effect in the quantum-dot system. We also compared the probability of obtaining those two effects under identical quantum measurements and found that the quantum-quantum YS effect is more likely to occur than the quantum-classical YS effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally investigate the variations of exchange-symmetry properties of the four Bell states in an exchange-symmetric pure dephasing process with a two-photon system generated from spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). Experiment results show that under such an exchange-symmetric local-noise Hamiltonian, the exchange-symmetry property remains unchanged for two of the three symmetric Bell states, i.e., the states ∣Φ⟩±=1/√2(∣00⟩±∣11⟩). For the antisymmetric Bell state ∣Ψ⟩-=1/√2(∣01⟩-∣10⟩), the exchange-symmetry property increases and achieves a maximum value of 0.5 at the asymptotic limit. However, for the third exchange-symmetric Bell state ∣Ψ⟩+=1/√2(∣01⟩+∣10⟩), the exchange-symmetry property breaks, surviving with a probability of 0.5 at the asymptotic limit, which provides some evidence supporting such decoherence-induced spontaneous-symmetry-breaking phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A century after its conception, quantum mechanics still hold surprises that contradict many "common sense" notions. The contradiction is especially sharp in case one consider trajectories of truly quantum objects such as single photons. From a classical point of view, trajectories are well defined for particles, but not for waves. The wave-particle duality forces a breakdown of this dichotomy and quantum mechanics resolves this in a remarkable way: Trajectories can be well defined, but they are utterly different from classical trajectories. Here, we give an operational definition to the trajectory of a single photon by introducing a technique to mark its path using its spectral composition. The method demonstrates that the frequency degree of freedom can be used as a bona fide quantum measurement device (meter). The analysis of a number of setups, using our operational definition, leads to anomalous trajectories which are noncontinuous and in some cases do not even connect the source of the photon to where it is detected. We carried out an experimental demonstration of these anomalous trajectories using a nested interferometer. We show that the two-state vector formalism provides a simple explanation for the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The original Heisenberg error-disturbance relation was recently shown to be not universally valid and two different approaches to reformulate it were proposed. The first one focuses on how the error and disturbance of two observables A and B depend on a particular quantum state. The second one asks how a joint measurement of A and B affects their eigenstates. Previous experiments focused on the first approach. Here we focus on the second one. First, we propose and implement an extendible method of quantum-walk-based joint measurements of noisy Pauli operators to test the error-disturbance relation for qubits introduced in the work of Busch et al. [Phys. Rev. A 89, 012129 (2014)], where the polarization of the single photon, corresponding to a walker's auxiliary degree of freedom that is commonly known as a coin, undergoes a position- and time-dependent evolution. Then we formulate and experimentally test a universally valid state-dependent relation for three mutually unbiased observables. We therefore establish a method of testing error-disturbance relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering describes the ability to steer remotely quantum states of an entangled pair by measuring locally one of its particles. Here we report on an experimental demonstration of single-system steering. The application to quantum communication is also investigated. Single-system steering refers to steering of a single d-dimensional quantum system that can be used in a unifying picture to certify the reliability of tasks employed in both quantum communication and quantum computation. In our experiment, high-dimensional quantum states are implemented by encoding polarization and orbital angular momentum of photons with dimensionality of up to 12. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of large-scale quantum networks relies on the development of practical quantum repeaters. Many approaches have been proposed with the goal of outperforming the direct transmission of photons, but most of them are inefficient or difficult to implement with current technology. Here, we present a protocol that uses a semihierarchical structure to improve the entanglement distribution rate while reducing the requirement of memory time to a range of tens of milliseconds. This protocol can be implemented with a fixed distance of elementary links and fixed requirements on quantum memories, which are independent of the total distance. This configuration is especially suitable for scalable applications in large-scale quantum networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate both theoretically and experimentally the dynamics of entanglement and nonlocality for two qubits immersed in a global pure dephasing environment. We demonstrate the existence of a class of states for which entanglement is forever frozen during the dynamics, even if the state of the system does evolve. At the same time nonlocal correlations, quantified by the violation of the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality, either undergo sudden death or are trapped during the dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

tandard weak measurement (SWM) has been proved to be a useful ingredient for measuring small longitudinal phase change (LPC) [X. Y. Xu, Y. Kedem, K. Sun, L. Vaidman, C. F. Li, and Guang-Can Guo, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 033604 (2013)]. In these SWM proposals, the working regime is selected where the relative phase between orthogonal components is zero, and the LPC can be detected by measuring the shift of the meter state, i.e., the time and frequency domain, which are conjugated observables. Here, we show that an extra bias phase can significantly improve the sensitivity of measuring LPC. This bias phase can be introduced by a precoupling process. Together with a special postselection, a destructive interference can be observed in both the time and frequency domain. Using a broadband source, this conjugated destructive interference occurs in a regime less than 1 as, while the related spectral shift reaches hundreds of THz, resulting in sensitivity outperforming SWM by two orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dimension witness is an important concept in fundamental physics and quantum information processing which allows one to test the dimension of an unknown physical system in a device independent manner. Here, we report an experimental test of classical and quantum dimensions in a prepare and measure scenario through dimension witnesses based on quantum state discrimination. In our work, we have not only distinguished between quantum and classical systems of the same dimension (two, three, and four dimensions) but also distinguished between real and complex two-level quantum systems. We have also shown the strong link between dimension witnesses and quantum state discrimination which was introduced in N. Brunner, M. Navascués, and T. Vértesi [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 150501 (2013)]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most intriguing intrinsic properties of the quantum world, quantum superposition provokes great interest in its own generation. Though a universal quantum machine that creates superposition of two arbitrary unknown states has been shown to be physically impossible, a probabilistic protocol exists given that two input states have nonzero overlaps with the referential state. Here we report a probabilistic quantum machine realizing superposition of two arbitrary unknown photonic qubits as long as they have nonzero overlaps with the horizontal polarization state |H⟩. A total of 11 different qubit pairs are chosen to test this protocol and we obtain the average fidelity as high as 0.99, which shows the excellent reliability of our realization. This realization may have significant applications in quantum information and quantum computation, e.g., generating nonclassical states and realizing information compression in a quantum computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A logical qubit based on electron-spin singlet-triplet states in a semiconductor double dot has emerged as one of the promising candidates for quantum information processing. Here we propose a systematic method to implement rapid quantum gates in the nanosecond time scale for both a single qubit and multiqubits, by applying adiabatic driving pulses with tunable velocity. This yields considerable high-fidelity gate operations reaching 99.9% which are crucial to scalable quantum computation in a semiconductor-based architecture, even considering the demanding experimental constraints and realistic spin and charge noises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cluster state plays a crucial role in one-way quantum computation. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a scheme to prepare an ultrahigh-fidelity four-photon linear cluster state via a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process. The state fidelity is measured to be 0.9517 ± 0.0027. Our scheme can be directly extended to more photons to generate an N-qubit linear cluster state. Furthermore, our scheme is optimal for generating photonic linear cluster states in the sense of achieving the maximal success probability and having the simplest strategy. The key idea is that the photon pairs are prepared in some special nonmaximally entangled states instead of the normal Bell states. To generate a 2N-qubit linear cluster state from N pairs of entangled photons, only (N - 1) Hong-Ou-Mandel interferences are needed and a success probability of (1/4)N-1 is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multipartite quantum nonlocality is an important diagnostic tool and resource for both researches in fundamental quantum mechanics and applications in quantum information protocols. Shared reference frames among all parties are usually required for experimentally observing quantum nonlocality, which is not possible in many circumstances. Previous results have shown violations of bipartite Bell inequalities with approaching unit probability, without shared reference frames. Here we experimentally demonstrate genuine multipartite quantum nonlocality without shared reference frames, using the Svetlichny inequality. A significant violation probability of 0.58 is observed with a high-fidelity three-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. Furthermore, when there is one shared axis among all the parties, which is the usual case in fiber-optic or earth-satellite links, the experimental results demonstrate the genuine three-partite nonlocality with certainty. Our experiment will be helpful for applications in multipartite quantum communication protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]