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 examine the implications of several recently derived conditions [Hillery and Zubairy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 050503 (2006)] for determining when a two-mode state is entangled. We first find examples of non-Gaussian states that satisfy these conditions. We then apply the entanglement conditions to the study of several linear devices, the beam splitter, the parametric amplifier, and the linear phase-insensitive amplifier. For the first two, we find conditions on the input states that guarantee that the output states are entangled. For the linear amplifier, we determine in the limit of high and no gain, when an entangled input leads to an entangled output. Finally, we show how application of two two-mode entanglement conditions to a three-mode state can serve as a test of genuine three-mode entanglement.

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Entanglement conditions for two-mode states: Applications

We point out some problems with the usual quantum-mechanical theory of electrodynamics in nonlinear dielectric media which is used in nonlinear optics. In order to understand these problems, the Hamiltonian formulation of the theory is examined. It is found that many of the difficulties in the usual theory are a result of the fact that the canonical momentum for the interacting theory is not the same as that for the free electromagnetic field theory.

Quantization of electrodynamics in nonlinear dielectric media

1. Classical nonlinear optics 2. Field quantization 3. Quantized fields in dielectric media 4. Microscopic description of media 5. Coherence and quantum dynamics in simple system 6. Decoherence and reservoirs 7. Phase-space representations 8. Single-mode devices 9. Degenerate parametric oscillator 10. Quantum fields in waveguides 11. Quantum propagation in nonlinear fibers 12. Quantum information.

The Quantum Theory of Nonlinear Optics

Classical pure states are coherent states

The real and imaginary parts of the square of the field amplitude are the variables that describe amplitude-squared squeezing. These quantities obey an uncertainty relation. Here we find a particularly simple subset of the states that satisfy the uncertainty relation as an equality. These states are constructed by applying a squeeze operator to a state that consists of a Hermite polynomial, whose argument is the mode creation operator multiplied by a constant, acting on the vacuum. The squeezed vacuum is such a state. These states may or may not be squeezed in the normal sense, and may or may not have sub-Poissonian photon statistics.

Mark Hillery

Papers

Entanglement conditions for two-mode states: Applications

Quantization of electrodynamics in nonlinear dielectric media

The Quantum Theory of Nonlinear Optics

Classical pure states are coherent states

Minimum uncertainty states for amplitude-squared squeezing: Hermite polynomial states.