There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

All our former experience with application of quantum theory seems to say:
{\it what is predicted by quantum formalism must occur in laboratory} But the
essence of quantum formalism - entanglement, recognized by Einstein, Podolsky,
Rosen and Schr\"odinger - waited over 70 years to enter to laboratories as a
new resource as real as energy This holistic property of compound quantum systems, which involves
nonclassical correlations between subsystems, is a potential for many quantum
processes, including ``canonical'' ones: quantum cryptography, quantum
teleportation and dense coding However, it appeared that this new resource is
very complex and difficult to detect Being usually fragile to environment, it
is robust against conceptual and mathematical tools, the task of which is to
decipher its rich structure This article reviews basic aspects of entanglement including its
characterization, detection, distillation and quantifying In particular, the
authors discuss various manifestations of entanglement via Bell inequalities,
entropic inequalities, entanglement witnesses, quantum cryptography and point
out some interrelations They also discuss a basic role of entanglement in
quantum communication within distant labs paradigm and stress some
peculiarities such as irreversibility of entanglement manipulations including
its extremal form - bound entanglement phenomenon A basic role of entanglement
witnesses in detection of entanglement is emphasized

Quantum entanglement

Quantum cryptography could well be the first application of quantum mechanics at the individual quanta level. The very fast progress in both theory and experiments over the recent years are reviewed, with emphasis on open questions and technological issues.

Quantum Cryptography

A review and tutorial of the fundamental ideas and methods of joint time-frequency distributions is presented. The objective of the field is to describe how the spectral content of a signal changes in time and to develop the physical and mathematical ideas needed to understand what a time-varying spectrum is. The basic gal is to devise a distribution that represents the energy or intensity of a signal simultaneously in time and frequency. Although the basic notions have been developing steadily over the last 40 years, there have recently been significant advances. This review is intended to be understandable to the nonspecialist with emphasis on the diversity of concepts and motivations that have gone into the formation of the field. >

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Time-frequency distributions-a review

as quantum engineering. In the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that many (perhaps all) of the symptoms of classicality can be induced in quantum systems by their environments. Thus decoherence is caused by the interaction in which the environment in effect monitors certain observables of the system, destroying coherence between the pointer states corresponding to their eigenvalues. This leads to environment-induced superselection or einselection, a quantum process associated with selective loss of information. Einselected pointer states are stable. They can retain correlations with the rest of the universe in spite of the environment. Einselection enforces classicality by imposing an effective ban on the vast majority of the Hilbert space, eliminating especially the flagrantly nonlocal ''Schrodinger-cat states.'' The classical structure of phase space emerges from the quantum Hilbert space in the appropriate macroscopic limit. Combination of einselection with dynamics leads to the idealizations of a point and of a classical trajectory. In measurements, einselection replaces quantum entanglement between the apparatus and the measured system with the classical correlation. Only the preferred pointer observable of the apparatus can store information that has predictive power. When the measured quantum system is microscopic and isolated, this restriction on the predictive utility of its correlations with the macroscopic apparatus results in the effective ''collapse of the wave packet.'' The existential interpretation implied by einselection regards observers as open quantum systems, distinguished only by their ability to acquire, store, and process information. Spreading of the correlations with the effectively classical pointer states throughout the environment allows one to understand ''classical reality'' as a property based on the relatively objective existence of the einselected states. Effectively classical pointer states can be ''found out'' without being re-prepared, e.g, by intercepting the information already present in the environment. The redundancy of the records of pointer states in the environment (which can be thought of as their ''fitness'' in the Darwinian sense) is a measure of their classicality. A new symmetry appears in this setting. Environment-assisted invariance or envariance sheds new light on the nature of ignorance of the state of the system due to quantum correlations with the environment and leads to Born's rules and to reduced density matrices, ultimately justifying basic principles of the program of decoherence and einselection.

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Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical

We show how to construct devices which implement non-unitary transformations on quantum systems with a certain probability of success. The first transforms two specified non-orthogonal states to orthogonal ones while the second can be used to enhance the entanglement of quantum states. The states themselves are composed of qubits which are realized as photons in the dual-rail representation, and these photons serve as the inputs to a six-port. One of the outputs is measured, and if a null result is obtained, the desired non-unitary transformation has been carried out. The transformation which takes non-orthogonal to orthogonal states is an optical realization of an optimal quantum measurement for distinguishing the two non-orthogonal states.

Non-unitary transformations in quantum mechanics: an optical realization

We analyze various scenarios for entangling two initially unentangled qubits. In particular, we propose an optimal universal entangler that entangles a qubit in unknown state $|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉$ with a qubit in a reference (known) state $|0〉.$ That is, our entangler generates the output state that is as close as possible to the pure (symmetrized) state $(|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉|0〉+|0〉|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉).$ The most attractive feature of this entangling machine, is that the fidelity of its performance (i.e., the distance between the output and the ideally entangled---symmetrized state) does not depend on the input and takes the constant value $\mathcal{F}=(9+3\sqrt{2})/14\ensuremath{\simeq}0.946.$ We also analyze how to optimally generate from a single qubit initially prepared in an unknown state $|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉$ a two qubit entangled system, which is as close as possible to a Bell state $(|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉|{\ensuremath{\Psi}}^{\ensuremath{\perp}}〉+|{\ensuremath{\Psi}}^{\ensuremath{\perp}}〉|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉),$ where $〈\ensuremath{\Psi}|{\ensuremath{\Psi}}^{\ensuremath{\perp}}〉=0.$

Optimal manipulations with qubits: Universal quantum entanglers

It is possible to determine whether the input state to a Kerr medium is nonclassical by measuring the total noise of the output state. For a classical input state the total noise at the output has a minimum value that depends on the photon number and the interaction time. If the total noise is found to be less than this value, then it can be concluded that the input state was nonclassical. A certain class of generalized coherent states can be detected in this way.

Detection of nonclassical states using a Kerr medium.

We study how quantum walks can be used to find structural anomalies in graphs via several examples. Two of our examples are based on star graphs, graphs with a single central vertex to which the other vertices, which we call external vertices, are connected by edges. In the basic star graph, these are the only edges. If we now connect a subset of the external vertices to form a complete subgraph, a quantum walk can be used to find these vertices with a quantum speedup. Thus, under some circumstances, a quantum walk can be used to locate where the connectivity of a network changes. We also look at the case of two stars connected at one of their external vertices. A quantum walk can find the vertex shared by both graphs, again with a quantum speedup. This provides an example of using a quantum walk in order to find where two networks are connected. Finally, we use a quantum walk on a complete bipartite graph to find an extra edge that destroys the bipartite nature of the graph.

/pdf/quantum-walks-as-a-probe-of-structural-anomalies-in-graphs-bbmdhlhi5c.pdf

Quantum walks as a probe of structural anomalies in graphs

We consider an unambiguous identification of an unknown coherent state with one of two unknown coherent reference states. Specifically, we consider two modes of an electromagnetic field prepared in unknown coherent states $\ensuremath{\mid}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{1}⟩$ and $\ensuremath{\mid}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{2}⟩$, respectively. The third mode is prepared either in the state $\ensuremath{\mid}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{1}⟩$ or in the state $\ensuremath{\mid}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{2}⟩$. The task is to identify (unambiguously) which of the two modes are in the same state. We present a scheme consisting of three beam splitters capable to perform this task. Although we do not prove the optimality, we show that the performance of the proposed setup is better than the generalization of the optimal measurement known for a finite-dimensional case. We show that a single beam splitter is capable to perform an unambiguous quantum state comparison for coherent states optimally. Finally, we propose an experimental setup consisting of $2N\ensuremath{-}1$ beam splitters for unambiguous identification among $N$ unknown coherent states. This setup can be considered as a search in a quantum database. The elements of the database are unknown coherent states encoded in different modes of an electromagnetic field. The task is to specify the two modes that are excited in the same, though unknown, coherent state.

Mark Hillery

Papers

Non-unitary transformations in quantum mechanics: an optical realization

Optimal manipulations with qubits: Universal quantum entanglers

Detection of nonclassical states using a Kerr medium.

Quantum walks as a probe of structural anomalies in graphs

Unambiguous identification of coherent states: Searching a quantum database