Comment on: "Measuring a Photonic Qubit without Destroying It"

Recently, Pryde et al reported the demonstration of a quantum non-demolition scheme for single-photon polarization states with linear optics and projective measurements [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 190402 (2004)]. Here, we argue that their interpretation of the experiment is inconsistent with the fidelity measure they use.Comment: one page, no figure

Entanglement and its Role in Shor's Algorithm

Entanglement has been termed a critical resource for quantum information processing and is thought to be the reason that certain quantum algorithms, such as Shor's factoring algorithm, can achieve exponentially better performance than their classical counterparts. The nature of this resource is still not fully understood: here we use numerical simulation to investigate how entanglement between register qubits varies as Shor's algorithm is run on a quantum computer. The shifting patterns in the entanglement are found to relate to the choice of basis for the quantum Fourier transform.Comment: 15 pages, 4 eps figures, v1-3 were for conference proceedings (not included in the end); v4 is improved following referee comments, expanded explanations and added reference

Environmental engineering for quantum energy transport

Transport phenomena are ubiquitous throughout the science, engineering and technology disciplines as it concerns energy, mass, charge and information exchange between systems. In particular, energy transport in the nanoscale regime has attracted significant attention within the physical science community due to its potential to explain complex phenomena like the electronic energy transfer in molecular crystals or the Fenna-Matthews-Olson / light harvesting complexes in photosynthetic bacteria with long time coherences. Energy transport in these systems is highly affected by environmental noise but surprisingly not always in a detrimental way. It was recently found that situations exist where noise actually enhances the transport phenomena. Such noise can take many forms, but can be characterised in three basic behaviours: quantum, coloured or nonlocal. All have been shown potential to offer an energy transport enhancement. The focus of this work is on quantum transport caused by stochastic environment with spatio-temporal correlation. We consider a multi-site nearest neighbour interaction model with pure dephasing environmental noise with coloured and nonlocal character and show how an accelerated rate for the energy transfer results especially under anti-correlation. Negative spatial correlations provide another control parameter to help one establish the most efficient transfer of energy and may provide new insights into the working of exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes. Further the usage of spatio-temporal correlated noise may be a beneficial resource for efficient transport in large scale quantum networks.Comment: 11 pages 5 figure

Photon phonon entanglement in coupled optomechanical arrays

We consider an array of three optomechanical cavities coupled either reversibly or irreversibly to each other and calculate the amount of entanglement between the different optical and mechanical modes. We show the composite system exhibits intercavity photon-phonon entanglement.Comment: Restructured paper after referee comments, Published versio

Practical limitations in optical entanglement purification

Entanglement purification protocols play an important role in the distribution of entangled systems, which is necessary for various quantum information processing applications. We consider the effects of photo-detector efficiency and bandwidth, channel loss and mode-mismatch on the operation of an optical entanglement purification protocol. We derive necessary detector and mode-matching requirements to facilitate practical operation of such a scheme, without having to resort to destructive coincidence type demonstrations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure