8,152 research outputs found
Photon-Number-Splitting versus Cloning Attacks in Practical Implementations of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol for Quantum Cryptography
In practical quantum cryptography, the source sometimes produces multi-photon
pulses, thus enabling the eavesdropper Eve to perform the powerful
photon-number-splitting (PNS) attack. Recently, it was shown by Curty and
Lutkenhaus [Phys. Rev. A 69, 042321 (2004)] that the PNS attack is not always
the optimal attack when two photons are present: if errors are present in the
correlations Alice-Bob and if Eve cannot modify Bob's detection efficiency, Eve
gains a larger amount of information using another attack based on a 2->3
cloning machine. In this work, we extend this analysis to all distances
Alice-Bob. We identify a new incoherent 2->3 cloning attack which performs
better than those described before. Using it, we confirm that, in the presence
of errors, Eve's better strategy uses 2->3 cloning attacks instead of the PNS.
However, this improvement is very small for the implementations of the
Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol. Thus, the existence of these new attacks
is conceptually interesting but basically does not change the value of the
security parameters of BB84. The main results are valid both for Poissonian and
sub-Poissonian sources.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures; "intuitive" formula (31) adde
Near-ideal spontaneous photon sources in silicon quantum photonics
While integrated photonics is a robust platform for quantum information
processing, architectures for photonic quantum computing place stringent
demands on high quality information carriers. Sources of single photons that
are highly indistinguishable and pure, that are either near-deterministic or
heralded with high efficiency, and that are suitable for mass-manufacture, have
been elusive. Here, we demonstrate on-chip photon sources that simultaneously
meet each of these requirements. Our photon sources are fabricated in silicon
using mature processes, and exploit a novel dual-mode pump-delayed excitation
scheme to engineer the emission of spectrally pure photon pairs through
intermodal spontaneous four-wave mixing in low-loss spiralled multi-mode
waveguides. We simultaneously measure a spectral purity of ,
a mutual indistinguishably of , and intrinsic
heralding efficiency. We measure on-chip quantum interference with a visibility
of between heralded photons from different sources. These
results represent a decisive step for scaling quantum information processing in
integrated photonics
Recurrence-based time series analysis by means of complex network methods
Complex networks are an important paradigm of modern complex systems sciences
which allows quantitatively assessing the structural properties of systems
composed of different interacting entities. During the last years, intensive
efforts have been spent on applying network-based concepts also for the
analysis of dynamically relevant higher-order statistical properties of time
series. Notably, many corresponding approaches are closely related with the
concept of recurrence in phase space. In this paper, we review recent
methodological advances in time series analysis based on complex networks, with
a special emphasis on methods founded on recurrence plots. The potentials and
limitations of the individual methods are discussed and illustrated for
paradigmatic examples of dynamical systems as well as for real-world time
series. Complex network measures are shown to provide information about
structural features of dynamical systems that are complementary to those
characterized by other methods of time series analysis and, hence,
substantially enrich the knowledge gathered from other existing (linear as well
as nonlinear) approaches.Comment: To be published in International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos
(2011
Non-linear Redundancy Calibration
For radio interferometric arrays with a sufficient number of redundant
spacings the multiplicity of measurements of the same sky visibility can be
used to determine both the antenna gains as well as the true visibilities. Many
of the earlier approaches to this problem focused on linearized versions of the
relation between the measured and the true visibilities. Here we propose to use
a standard non-linear minimization algorithm to solve for both the antenna
gains as well as the true visibilities. We show through simulations done in the
context of the ongoing upgrade to the Ooty Radio Telescope that the non-linear
minimization algorithm is fast compared to the earlier approaches. Further,
unlike the most straightforward linearized approach, which works with the
logarithms of the visibilities and the gains, the non-linear minimization
algorithm leads to unbiased solutions. Finally we present error estimates for
the estimated gains and visibilities. Monte-Carlo simulations establish that
the estimator is indeed statistically efficient, achieving the Cramer-Rao
bound.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. The definitive
version will be available at http://mnras.oxfordjournals.or
Unified functional network and nonlinear time series analysis for complex systems science: The pyunicorn package
We introduce the \texttt{pyunicorn} (Pythonic unified complex network and
recurrence analysis toolbox) open source software package for applying and
combining modern methods of data analysis and modeling from complex network
theory and nonlinear time series analysis. \texttt{pyunicorn} is a fully
object-oriented and easily parallelizable package written in the language
Python. It allows for the construction of functional networks such as climate
networks in climatology or functional brain networks in neuroscience
representing the structure of statistical interrelationships in large data sets
of time series and, subsequently, investigating this structure using advanced
methods of complex network theory such as measures and models for spatial
networks, networks of interacting networks, node-weighted statistics or network
surrogates. Additionally, \texttt{pyunicorn} provides insights into the
nonlinear dynamics of complex systems as recorded in uni- and multivariate time
series from a non-traditional perspective by means of recurrence quantification
analysis (RQA), recurrence networks, visibility graphs and construction of
surrogate time series. The range of possible applications of the library is
outlined, drawing on several examples mainly from the field of climatology.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figure
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