Single-photon-assisted entanglement concentration of a multi-photon system in a partially entangled W state with weak cross-Kerr nonlinearity

We propose a nonlocal entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for $N$-photon systems in a partially entangled W state, resorting to some ancillary single photons and the parity-check measurement based on cross-Kerr nonlinearity. One party in quantum communication first performs a parity-check measurement on her photon in an $N$-photon system and an ancillary photon, and then she picks up the even-parity instance for obtaining the standard W state. When she obtains an odd-parity instance, the system is in a less-entanglement state and it is the resource in the next round of entanglement concentration. By iterating the entanglement concentration process several times, the present ECP has the total success probability approaching to the limit in theory. The present ECP has the advantage of a high success probability. Moreover, the present ECP requires only the $N$-photon system itself and some ancillary single photons, not two copies of the systems, which decreases the difficulty of its implementation largely in experiment. It maybe have good applications in quantum communication in future.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Quantum information with continuous variables

Quantum information is a rapidly advancing area of interdisciplinary research. It may lead to real-world applications for communication and computation unavailable without the exploitation of quantum properties such as nonorthogonality or entanglement. We review the progress in quantum information based on continuous quantum variables, with emphasis on quantum optical implementations in terms of the quadrature amplitudes of the electromagnetic field.Comment: accepted for publication in Reviews of Modern Physic

Proposed optical realisation of a two photon, four-qubit entangled χ\chi state

The four-qubit states $\lvert\chi^{ij}\rangle$, exhibiting genuinely multi-partite entanglement have been shown to have many interesting properties and have been suggested for novel applications in quantum information processing. In this work we propose a simple quantum circuit and its corresponding optical embodiment with which to prepare photon pairs in the $\lvert\chi^{ij}\rangle$ states. Our approach uses hyper-entangled photon pairs, produced by the type-I spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process in two contiguous nonlinear crystals, together with a set of simple linear-optical transformations. Our photon pairs are maximally hyper-entangled in both their polarisation and orbital angular momentum (OAM). After one of these daughter photons passes through our optical setup, we obtain photon pairs in the hyper-entangled state $\lvert\chi^{00}\rangle$, and the $\lvert\chi^{ij}\rangle$ states can be achieved by further simple transformations.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Optic

Transformations among Pure Multipartite Entangled States via Local Operations Are Almost Never Possible

Local operations assisted by classical communication (LOCC) constitute the free operations in entanglement theory. Hence, the determination of LOCC transformations is crucial for the understanding of entanglement. We characterize here almost all LOCC transformations among pure multipartite multilevel states. Combined with the analogous results for qubit states shown by Gour \emph{et al.} [J. Math. Phys. 58, 092204 (2017)], this gives a characterization of almost all local transformations among multipartite pure states. We show that nontrivial LOCC transformations among generic, fully entangled, pure states are almost never possible. Thus, almost all multipartite states are isolated. They can neither be deterministically obtained from local-unitary-inequivalent (LU-inequivalent) states via local operations, nor can they be deterministically transformed to pure, fully entangled LU-inequivalent states. In order to derive this result, we prove a more general statement, namely, that, generically, a state possesses no nontrivial local symmetry. We discuss further consequences of this result for the characterization of optimal, probabilistic single copy and probabilistic multi-copy LOCC transformations and the characterization of LU-equivalence classes of multipartite pure states.Comment: 13 pages main text + 10 pages appendix, 1 figure; close to published versio

Entanglement detection via condition of quantum correlation

We develop a novel necessary condition of quantum correlation. It is utilized to construct $d$-level bipartite Bell-type inequality which is strongly resistant to noise and requires only analyses of $O(d)$ measurement outcomes compared to the previous result $O(d^{2})$. Remarkably, a connection between the arbitrary high-dimensional bipartite Bell-type inequality and entanglement witnesses is found. Through the necessary condition of quantum correlation, we propose that the witness operators to detect truly multipartite entanglement for a generalized Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state with two local measurement settings and a four-qubit singlet state with three settings. Moreover, we also propose the first robust entanglement witness to detect four-level tripartite GHZ state with only two local measurement settings

Maximally correlated multipartite quantum states

We investigate quantum states that posses both maximum entanglement and maximum discord between the pertinent parties. Since entanglement (discord) is defined only for bipartite (two qubit) systems, we shall introduce an appropriate sum over of all bi-partitions as the associated measure. The ensuing definition --not new for entanglement-- is thus extended here to quantum discord. Also, additional dimensions within the parties are considered ({\it qudits}). We also discuss nonlocality (in the form of maximum violation of a Bell inequality) for all multiqubit systems. The emergence of more nonlocal states than local ones, all of them possessing maximum entanglement, will be linked, surprisingly enough, to whether quantum mechanics is defined over the fields of real or complex numbers.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 table