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Homodyne measurement is a crucial tool widely used to address continuous variables for bosonic quantum systems. While an ideal homodyne detection provides a powerful analysis, e.g. to effectively measure quadrature amplitudes of light in quantum optics, it relies on the use of a strong reference field, the so-called local oscillator typically in a coherent state. Such a strong coherent local oscillator may not be readily available particularly for a massive quantum system like Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), posing a substantial challenge in dealing with continuous variables appropriately. It is necessary to establish a practical framework that includes the effects of non-ideal local oscillators for a rigorous assessment of various quantum tests and applications. We here develop entanglement criteria beyond Gaussian regime applicable for this realistic homodyne measurement that do not require assumptions on the state of local oscillators. We discuss the working conditions of homodyne detection to effectively detect non-Gaussian quantum entanglement under various states of local oscillators., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

Hybridizing different degrees of freedom or physical platforms potentially offers various advantages in building scalable quantum architectures. We here introduce a fault-tolerant hybrid quantum computation by taking the advantages of both discrete variable (DV) and continuous variable (CV) systems. Particularly, we define a CV-DV hybrid qubit with bosonic cat-code and single photon, which is implementable in current photonic platforms. By the cat-code encoded in the CV part, the dominant loss errors are readily correctable without multi-qubit encoding, while the logical basis is inherently orthogonal due to the DV part. We design fault-tolerant architectures by concatenating hybrid qubits and an outer DV quantum error correction code such as topological codes, exploring their potential merits in developing scalable quantum computation. We demonstrate by numerical simulations that our scheme is at least an order of magnitude more resource-efficient over all previous proposals in photonic platforms, allowing to achieve a record-high loss threshold among existing CV and hybrid approaches. We discuss its realization not only in all-photonic platforms but also in other hybrid platforms including superconduting and trapped-ion systems, which allows us to find various efficient routes towards fault-tolerant quantum computing., Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures

We show that, contrary to the claim by Kumar [Phys. Rev. A 96, 012332 (2017)], the quantum dual total correlation of an $n$-partite quantum state cannot be represented as the quantum relative entropy between $n-1$ copies of the quantum state and the product of $n$ different reduced quantum states for $n \geq 3$. Specifically, we argue that the latter fails to yield a finite value for generalized $n$-partite Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states., Comment: 2 pages, close to published version

We propose a non-Gaussianity measure of a multimode quantum state based on the negentropy of quadrature distributions. Our measure satisfies desirable properties as a non-Gaussianity measure, i.e., faithfulness, invariance under Gaussian unitary operations, and monotonicity under Gaussian channels. Furthermore, we find a quantitative relation between our measure and the previously proposed non-Gaussianity measures defined via quantum relative entropy and the quantum Hilbert-Schmidt distance. This allows us to estimate the non-Gaussianity measures readily by homodyne detection, which would otherwise require a full quantum-state tomography., Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, close to published version

Quantum technology offers great advantages in many applications by exploiting quantum resources like nonclassicality, coherence, and entanglement. In practice, an environmental noise unavoidably affects a quantum system and it is thus an important issue to protect quantum resources from noise. In this work, we investigate the manipulation of quantum resources possessing the so-called tensorization property and identify the fundamental limitations on concentrating and preserving those quantum resources. We show that if a resource measure satisfies the tensorization property as well as the monotonicity, it is impossible to concentrate multiple noisy copies into a single better resource by free operations. Furthermore, we show that quantum resources cannot be better protected from channel noises by employing correlated input states on joint channels if the channel output resource exhibits the tensorization property. We address several practical resource measures where our theorems apply and manifest their physical meanings in quantum resource manipulation., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures

In this work we investigate how to quantify the coherence of quantum measurements. First, we establish a resource theoretical framework to address the coherence of measurement and show that any statistical distance can be adopted to define a coherence monotone of measurement. For instance, the relative entropy fulfills all the required properties as a proper monotone. We specifically introduce a coherence monotone of measurement in terms of off-diagonal elements of Positive-Operator-Valued Measure (POVM) components. This quantification provides a lower bound on the robustness of measurement-coherence that has an operational meaning as the maximal advantage over all incoherent measurements in state discrimination tasks. Finally, we propose an experimental scheme to assess our quantification of measurement-coherence and demonstrate it by performing an experiment using a single qubit on IBM Q processor.

While negativity in phase space is a well-known signature of nonclassicality, a wide variety of nonclassical states require their characterization beyond negativity. We establish a framework of nonclassicality in phase space that addresses nonclassical states comprehensively with a direct experimental evidence. This includes the negativity of phase-space distribution as a special case and further analyzes quantum states with positive distributions effectively. We prove that it detects all nonclassical Gaussian states and all non-Gaussian states of arbitrary dimension remarkably by examining three phase-space points only. Our formalism also provides an experimentally accessible lower bound for a nonclassicality measure based on trace distance. Importantly, this foundational approach can be further adapted to constitute practical tests in two directions looking into particle and wave nature of bosonic systems, via an array of nonideal on-off detectors and coarse-grained homodyne measurement, respectively. All these tests are practically powerful in characterizing nonclasssical states reliably against noise, making a versatile tool for a broad range of quantum systems in quantum technologies., Comment: 7+10 pages, 3+11 figures, close to published version

No-cloning theorem, a profound fundamental principle of quantum mechanics, also provides a crucial practical basis for secure quantum communication. The security of communication can be ultimately guaranteed if the output fidelity via communication channel is above the no-cloning bound (NCB). In quantum communications using continuous-variable (CV) systems, Gaussian states, more specifically, coherent states have been widely studied as inputs, but less is known for non-Gaussian states. We aim at exploring quantum communication covering CV states comprehensively with distinct sets of unknown states properly defined. Our main results here are (i) to establish the NCB for a broad class of quantum non-Gaussian states including Fock states, their superpositions and Schrodinger-cat states and (ii) to examine the relation between NCB and quantum non-Gaussianity (QNG). We find that NCB typically decreases with QNG. Remarkably, this does not mean that quantum non-Gaussian states are less demanding for secure communication. By extending our study to mixed-state inputs, we demonstrate that QNG specifically in terms of Wigner negativity requires more resources to achieve output fidelity above NCB in CV teleportation. The more non-Gaussian, the harder to achieve secure communication, which can have crucial implications for CV quantum communications., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, and supplemental information

We introduce a measure of quantum non-Gaussianity (QNG) for those quantum states not accessible by a mixture of Gaussian states in terms of quantum relative entropy. Specifically, we employ a convex-roof extension using all possible mixed-state decompositions beyond the usual pure-state decompositions. We prove that this approach brings a QNG measure fulfilling the properties desired as a proper monotone under Gaussian channels and conditional Gaussian operations. As an illustration, we explicitly calculate QNG for the noisy single-photon states and demonstrate that QNG coincides with non-Gaussianity of the state itself when the single-photon fraction is sufficiently large., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, published version

We consider how to quantify non-Gaussianity for the correlation of a bipartite quantum state by using various measures such as relative entropy and geometric distances. We first show that an intuitive approach, i.e., subtracting the correlation of a reference Gaussian state from that of a target non-Gaussian state, fails to yield a non-negative measure with monotonicity under local Gaussian channels. Our finding clearly manifests that quantum-state correlations generally have no Gaussian extremality. We therefore propose a different approach by introducing relevantly averaged states to address correlation. This enables us to define a non-Gaussianity measure based on, e.g., the trace-distance and the fidelity, fulfilling all requirements as a measure of non-Gaussian correlation. For the case of the fidelity-based measure, we also present readily computable lower bounds of non-Gaussian correlation., Comment: published version, 10 pages, 6 figures

Quantum teleportation is one of the crucial protocols in quantum information processing. It is important to accomplish an efficient teleportation under practical conditions, aiming at a higher fidelity desirably using fewer resources. The continuous-variable (CV) version of quantum teleportation was first proposed using a Gaussian state as a quantum resource, while other attempts were also made to improve performance by applying non-Gaussian operations. We investigate the CV teleportation to find its ultimate fidelity under energy constraint identifying an optimal quantum state. For this purpose, we present a formalism to evaluate teleportation fidelity as an expectation value of an operator. Using this formalism, we prove that the optimal state must be a form of photon-number entangled states. We further show that Gaussian states are near-optimal while non-Gaussian states make a slight improvement and therefore are rigorously optimal, particularly in the low-energy regime., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, published version

A standard method to obtain information on a quantum state is to measure marginal distributions along many different axes in phase space, which forms a basis of quantum state tomography. We theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a general framework to manifest nonclassicality by observing a single marginal distribution only, which provides a novel insight into nonclassicality and a practical applicability to various quantum systems. Our approach maps the 1-dim marginal distribution into a factorized 2-dim distribution by multiplying the measured distribution or the vacuum-state distribution along an orthogonal axis. The resulting fictitious Wigner function becomes unphysical only for a nonclassical state, thus the negativity of the corresponding density operator provides an evidence of nonclassicality. Furthermore, the negativity measured this way yields a lower bound for entanglement potential---a measure of entanglement generated using a nonclassical state with a beam splitter setting that is a prototypical model to produce continuous-variable (CV) entangled states. Our approach detects both Gaussian and non-Gaussian nonclassical states in a reliable and efficient manner. Remarkably, it works regardless of measurement axis for all non-Gaussian states in finite-dimensional Fock space of any size, also extending to infinite-dimensional states of experimental relevance for CV quantum informatics. We experimentally illustrate the power of our criterion for motional states of a trapped ion confirming their nonclassicality in a measurement-axis independent manner. We also address an extension of our approach combined with phase-shift operations, which leads to a stronger test of nonclassicality, i.e. detection of genuine non-Gaussianity under a CV measurement., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures with Supplemental Information

Quantum teleportation (QT) is a fundamentally remarkable communication protocol that also finds many important applications for quantum informatics. Given a quantum entangled resource, it is crucial to know to what extent one can accomplish the QT. This is usually assessed in terms of output fidelity, which can also be regarded as an operational measure of entanglement. In the case of multipartite communication when each communicator possesses a part of $N$-partite entangled state, not all pairs of communicators can achieve a high fidelity due to monogamy property of quantum entanglement. We here investigate how such a monogamy relation arises in multipartite continuous-variable (CV) teleportation particularly using a Gaussian entangled state. We show a strict monogamy relation, i.e. a sender cannot achieve a fidelity higher than optimal cloning limit with more than one receiver. While this seems rather natural owing to the no-cloning theorem, a strict monogamy relation still holds even if the sender is allowed to individually manipulate the reduced state in collaboration with each receiver to improve fidelity. The local operations are further extended to non-Gaussian operations such as photon subtraction and addition, and we demonstrate that the Gaussian cloning bound cannot be beaten by more than one pair of communicators. Furthermore we investigate a quantitative form of monogamy relation in terms of teleportation capability, for which we show that a faithful monogamy inequality does not exist., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, published version

We establish the fundamental limit of communication capacity within Gaussian schemes under phase-insensitive Gaussian channels, which employ multimode Gaussian states for encoding and collective Gaussian operations and measurements for decoding. We prove that this Gaussian capacity is additive, i.e., its upper bound occurs with separable encoding and separable receivers so that a single-mode communication suffices to achieve the largest capacity under Gaussian schemes. This rigorously characterizes the gap between the ultimate Holevo capacity and the capacity within Gaussian communication, showing that Gaussian regime is not sufficient to achieve the Holevo bound particularly in the low-photon regime. Furthermore the Gaussian benchmark established here can be used to critically assess the performance of non-Gaussian protocols for optical communication. We move on to identify non-Gaussian schemes to beat the Gaussian capacity and show that a non-Gaussian receiver recently implemented by Becerra et al. [Nat. Photon. 7, 147 (2013)] can achieve this aim with an appropriately chosen encoding strategy., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, with supplemental material

Quantum steering---a strong correlation to be verified even when one party or its measuring device is fully untrusted---not only provides a profound insight into quantum physics but also offers a crucial basis for practical applications. For continuous-variable (CV) systems, Gaussian states among others have been extensively studied, however, mostly confined to Gaussian measurements. While the fulfillment of Gaussian criterion is sufficient to detect CV steering, whether it is also necessary for Gaussian states is a question of fundamental importance in many contexts. This critically questions the validity of characterizations established only under Gaussian measurements like the quantification of steering and the monogamy relations. Here, we introduce a formalism based on local uncertainty relations of non-Gaussian measurements, which is shown to manifest quantum steering of some Gaussian states that Gaussian criterion fails to detect. To this aim, we look into Gaussian states of practical relevance, i.e. two-mode squeezed states under a lossy and an amplifying Gaussian channel. Our finding significantly modifies the characteristics of Gaussian-state steering so far established such as monogamy relations and one-way steering under Gaussian measurements, thus opening a new direction for critical studies beyond Gaussian regime., Comment: Published version, 9 pages, 3 figures

We derive steerability criteria applicable for both finite and infinite dimensional quantum systems using covariance matrices of local observables. We show that these criteria are useful to detect a wide range of entangled states particularly in high dimensional systems and that the Gaussian steering criteria for general M x N-modes of continuous variables are obtained as a special case. Extending from the approach of entanglement detection via covariance matrices, our criteria are based on the local uncertainty principles incorporating the asymmetric nature of steering scenario. Specifically, we apply the formulation to the case of local orthogonal observables and obtain some useful criteria that can be straightforwardly computable, and testable in experiment, with no need for numerical optimization., Comment: 6 pages with further "Remarks" and "Acknowledgement" added

We study the sensitivity of phase estimation using a generic class of path-symmetric entangled states $|\varphi\rangle|0\rangle+|0\rangle|\varphi\rangle$, where an arbitrary state $|\varphi\rangle$ occupies one of two modes in quantum superposition. This class of states includes the previously considered states, i.e. $NOON$ states and entangled coherent states, as special cases. With its generalization, we identify the practical limit of phase estimation under energy constraint that is characterized by the photon statistics of the component state $|\varphi\rangle$. We first show that quantum Cramer-Rao bound (QCRB) can be lowered with super-Poissonianity of the state $|\varphi\rangle$. By introducing a component state of the form $|\varphi\rangle=\sqrt{q}|1\rangle+\sqrt{1-q}|N\rangle$, we particularly show that an arbitrarily small QCRB can be achieved even with a finite energy in an ideal situation. For practical measurement schemes, we consider a parity measurement and a full photon-counting method to obtain phase-sensitivity. Without photon loss, the latter scheme employing any path-symmetric states $|\varphi\rangle|0\rangle+|0\rangle|\varphi\rangle$ achieves the QCRB over the entire range $[0,2\pi]$ of unknown phase shift $\phi$ whereas the former does so in a certain confined range of $\phi$. We find that the case of $|\varphi\rangle=\sqrt{q}|1\rangle+\sqrt{1-q}|N\rangle$ provides the most robust resource against loss among the considered entangled states over the whole range of input energy. Finally we also propose experimental schemes to generate these path-symmetric entangled states., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, published version

We theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a nonclassicality test of single-mode field in phase space, which has an analogy with the nonlocality test proposed by Banaszek and Wodkiewicz [Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 2009 (1999)]. Our approach to deriving the classical bound draws on the fact that the Wigner function of a coherent state is a product of two independent distributions as if the orthogonal quadratures (position and momentum) in phase space behave as local realistic variables. Our method detects every pure nonclassical Gaussian state, which can also be extended to mixed states. Furthermore, it sets a bound for all Gaussian states and their mixtures, thereby providing a criterion to detect a genuine quantum non-Gaussian state. Remarkably, our phase-space approach with invariance under Gaussian unitary operations leads to an optimized test for a given non-Gaussian state. We experimentally show how this enhanced method can manifest quantum non-Gaussianity of a state by simply choosing phase-space points appropriately, which is essentially equivalent to implementing a squeezing operation on a given state., Comment: 5 pages and 3 figures with Supplemental Material, published version

A long-standing problem on the classical capacity of bosonic Gaussian channels has recently been resolved by proving the minimum output entropy conjecture. It is also known that the ultimate capacity quantified by the Holevo bound can be achieved asymptotically by using an infinite number of channels. However, it is less understood to what extent the communication capacity can be reached if one uses a finite number of channels, which is a topic of practical importance. In this paper, we study the capacity of Gaussian communication, i.e., employing Gaussian states and Gaussian measurements to encode and decode information under a single-channel use. We prove that the optimal capacity of single-channel Gaussian communication is achieved by one of two well-known protocols, i.e., coherent-state communication or squeezed-state communication, depending on the energy (number of photons) as well as the characteristics of the channel. Our result suggests that the coherent-state scheme known to achieve the ultimate information-theoretic capacity is not a practically optimal scheme for the case of using a finite number of channels. We find that overall the squeezed-state communication is optimal in a small-photon-number regime whereas the coherent-state communication performs better in a large-photon-number regime., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, published version

We study a continuous variable (CV) dense-coding protocol, originally proposed to employ a two-mode squeezed state, using a general two-mode Gaussian state as a quantum channel. We particularly obtain conditions to manifest quantum advantage by beating two well-known single-mode schemes, namely, the squeezed-state scheme (best Gaussian scheme) and the number-state scheme (optimal scheme achieving the Holevo bound). We then extend our study to a multipartite Gaussian state and investigate the monogamy of operational entanglement measured by the communication capacity under the dense-coding protocol. We show that this operational entanglement represents a strict monogamy relation, by means of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle among different parties, i.e., the quantum advantage for communication can be possible for only one pair of two-mode systems among many parties.

The quantum-to-classical transition of a quantum state is a topic of great interest in fundamental and practical aspects. A coarse-graining in quantum measurement has recently been suggested as its possible account in addition to the usual decoherence model. We here investigate the reconstruction of a Gaussian state (single mode and two modes) by coarse-grained homodyne measurements. To this aim, we employ two methods, the direct reconstruction of the covariance matrix and the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), respectively, and examine the reconstructed state under each scheme compared to the state interacting with a Gaussian (squeezed thermal) reservoir. We clearly demonstrate that the coarse-graining model, though applied equally to all quadrature amplitudes, is not compatible with the decoherence model by a thermal (phase-insensitive) reservoir. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the direct reconstruction and the MLE methods by investigating the fidelity and the nonclassicality of the reconstructed states and show that the MLE method can generally yield a more reliable reconstruction, particularly without information on a reference frame (phase of input state)., Comment: published version, 9 pages, 5 figures

We study the task of distilling entanglement by a coherent superposition operation $t\hat{a}+r\hat{a}^\dagger$ applied to a continuous-variable state under a thermal noise. In particular, we compare the performances of two different strategies, i.e., the non-Gaussian operation $t\hat{a}+r\hat{a}^\dagger$ is applied before or after the noisy Gaussian channel. This is closely related to a fundamental problem of whether Gaussian or non-Gaussian entanglement can be more robust under a noisy channel and also provides a useful insight into the practical implementation of entanglement distribution for a long-distance quantum communication. We specifically look into two entanglement characteristics, the logarithmic negativity as a measure of entanglement and the teleportation fidelity as a usefulness of entanglement, for each distilled state. We find that the non-Gaussian operation after (before) the thermal noise becomes more effective in the low (high) temperature regime.

A discussion on the robustness of continuous-variable entangled states under noisy environment is briefly given in direct relation to Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 100503 (2010)., Comment: published version, originally submitted on 22 November 2010

We examine a search on a graph among a number of different kinds of objects (vertices), one of which we want to find. In a standard graph search, all of the vertices are the same, except for one, the marked vertex, and that is the one we wish to find. We examine the case in which the unmarked vertices can be of different types, so the background against which the search is done is not uniform. We find that the search can still be successful, but the probability of success is lower than in the uniform background case, and that probability decreases with the number of types of unmarked vertices. We also show how the graph searches can be rephrased as equivalent oracle problems.

We propose a cavity-QED-based scheme of generating entanglement between atoms. The scheme is scalable to an arbitrary number of atoms, and can be used to generate a variety of multipartite entangled states such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger, W, and cluster states. Furthermore, with a role switching of atoms with photons, the scheme can be used to generate entanglement between cavity fields. We also introduce a scheme that can generate an arbitrary multipartite field graph state., Comment: 7 pages, 10 figure, published to PRA