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We theoretically investigate and experimentally demonstrate a procedure for conditional control and enhancement of an interferometric coupling between two qubits encoded into states of bosonic particles. Our procedure combines local coupling of one of the particles to an auxiliary mode and single-qubit quantum filtering. We experimentally verify the proposed procedure using a linear optical setup where qubits are encoded into quantum states of single photons and coupled at a beam splitter with a fixed transmittance. With our protocol, we implement a range of different effective transmittances, demonstrate both enhancement and reduction of the coupling strength, and observe dependence of two-photon bunching on the effective transmittance. To make our analysis complete, we also theoretically investigate a more general scheme where each particle is coupled to a separate auxiliary mode and show that this latter scheme enables to achieve higher implementation probability. We show that our approach can be extended also to other kinds of qubit-qubit interactions., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, REVTeX4

We experimentally demonstrate the underlying physical mechanism of the recently proposed protocol for superreplication of quantum phase gates [W. D\"ur, P. Sekatski, and M. Skotiniotis, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 120503 (2015)], which allows to produce up to $N^2$ high-fidelity replicas from N input copies in the limit of large N. Our implementation of 1->2 replication of the single-qubit phase gates is based on linear optics and qubits encoded into states of single photons. We employ the quantum Toffoli gate to imprint information about the structure of an input two-qubit state onto an auxiliary qubit, apply the replicated operation to the auxiliary qubit, and then disentangle the auxiliary qubit from the other qubits by a suitable quantum measurement. We characterize the replication protocol by full quantum process tomography and observe good agreement of the experimental results with theory., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, REVTeX 4

Localizability of entanglement in fully inseparable states is a key ingredient of assisted quantum information protocols as well as measurement-based models of quantum computing. We investigate the existence of fully inseparable states with nonlocalizable entanglement, that is, with entanglement which cannot be localized between any pair of subsystems by any measurement on the remaining part of the system. It is shown, that the nonlocalizable entanglement occurs already in suitable mixtures of a three-qubit GHZ state and white noise. Further, we generalize this set of states to a two-parametric family of fully inseparable three-qubit states with nonlocalizable entanglement. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally the existence of nonlocalizable entanglement by preparing and characterizing one state from the family using correlated single photons and linear optical circuit., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a scheme for implementation of a maximally entangling quantum controlled-Z gate between two weakly interacting systems. We conditionally enhance the interqubit coupling by quantum interference. Both before and after the interqubit interaction, one of the qubits is coherently coupled to an auxiliary quantum system, and finally it is projected back onto qubit subspace. We experimentally verify the practical feasibility of this technique by using a linear optical setup with weak interferometric coupling between single-photon qubits. Our procedure is universally applicable to a wide range of physical platforms including hybrid systems such as atomic clouds or optomechanical oscillators coupled to light., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, REVTeX4

We investigate optimal discrimination between two projective single-qubit measurements in a scenario where the measurement can be performed only once. We consider general setting involving a tunable fraction of inconclusive outcomes and we prove that the optimal discrimination strategy requires an entangled probe state for any nonzero rate of inconclusive outcomes. We experimentally implement this optimal discrimination strategy for projective measurements on polarization states of single photons. Our setup involves a real-time electrooptical feed-forward loop which allows us to fully harness the benefits of entanglement in discrimination of quantum measurements. The experimental data clearly demonstrate the advantage of entanglement-based discrimination strategy as compared to unentangled single-qubit probes., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

A quantum analog of the fundamental classical NOT gate is a quantum gate that would transform any input qubit state onto an orthogonal state. Intriguingly, this universal NOT gate is forbidden by the laws of quantum physics. This striking phenomenon has far-reaching implications concerning quantum information processing and encoding information about directions and reference frames into quantum states. It also triggers the question under what conditions the preparation of quantum states orthogonal to input states becomes possible. Here we report on experimental demonstration of orthogonalization of partly unknown single- and two-qubit quantum states. A state orthogonal to an input state is conditionally prepared by quantum filtering, and the only required information about the input state is a mean value of a single arbitrary operator. We show that perfect orthogonalization of partly unknown two-qubit entangled states can be performed by applying the quantum filter to one of the qubits only., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, REVTeX4

We present a systematic comparison of different methods of fidelity estimation of a linear optical quantum controlled-Z gate implemented by two-photon interference on a partially polarizing beam splitter. We have utilized a linear fidelity estimator based on the Monte Carlo sampling technique as well as a non-linear estimator based on maximum likelihood reconstruction of a full quantum process matrix. In addition, we have also evaluated lower bound on quantum gate fidelity determined by average quantum state fidelities for two mutually unbiased bases. In order to probe various regimes of operation of the gate we have introduced a tunable delay line between the two photons. This allowed us to move from high-fidelity operation to a regime where the photons become distinguishable and the success probability of the scheme significantly depends on input state. We discuss in detail possible systematic effects that could influence the gate fidelity estimation., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures REVTeX4