36,907 research outputs found
Symbolic Abstractions for Quantum Protocol Verification
Quantum protocols such as the BB84 Quantum Key Distribution protocol exchange
qubits to achieve information-theoretic security guarantees. Many variants
thereof were proposed, some of them being already deployed. Existing security
proofs in that field are mostly tedious, error-prone pen-and-paper proofs of
the core protocol only that rarely account for other crucial components such as
authentication. This calls for formal and automated verification techniques
that exhaustively explore all possible intruder behaviors and that scale well.
The symbolic approach offers rigorous, mathematical frameworks and automated
tools to analyze security protocols. Based on well-designed abstractions, it
has allowed for large-scale formal analyses of real-life protocols such as TLS
1.3 and mobile telephony protocols. Hence a natural question is: Can we use
this successful line of work to analyze quantum protocols? This paper proposes
a first positive answer and motivates further research on this unexplored path
Quantum metrology and its application in biology
Quantum metrology provides a route to overcome practical limits in sensing
devices. It holds particular relevance to biology, where sensitivity and
resolution constraints restrict applications both in fundamental biophysics and
in medicine. Here, we review quantum metrology from this biological context,
focusing on optical techniques due to their particular relevance for biological
imaging, sensing, and stimulation. Our understanding of quantum mechanics has
already enabled important applications in biology, including positron emission
tomography (PET) with entangled photons, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using
nuclear magnetic resonance, and bio-magnetic imaging with superconducting
quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). In quantum metrology an even greater
range of applications arise from the ability to not just understand, but to
engineer, coherence and correlations at the quantum level. In the past few
years, quite dramatic progress has been seen in applying these ideas into
biological systems. Capabilities that have been demonstrated include enhanced
sensitivity and resolution, immunity to imaging artifacts and technical noise,
and characterization of the biological response to light at the single-photon
level. New quantum measurement techniques offer even greater promise, raising
the prospect for improved multi-photon microscopy and magnetic imaging, among
many other possible applications. Realization of this potential will require
cross-disciplinary input from researchers in both biology and quantum physics.
In this review we seek to communicate the developments of quantum metrology in
a way that is accessible to biologists and biophysicists, while providing
sufficient detail to allow the interested reader to obtain a solid
understanding of the field. We further seek to introduce quantum physicists to
some of the central challenges of optical measurements in biological science.Comment: Submitted review article, comments and suggestions welcom
Constraining Exoplanet Mass from Transmission Spectroscopy
Determination of an exoplanet's mass is a key to understanding its basic
properties, including its potential for supporting life. To date, mass
constraints for exoplanets are predominantly based on radial velocity (RV)
measurements, which are not suited for planets with low masses, large
semi-major axes, or those orbiting faint or active stars. Here, we present a
method to extract an exoplanet's mass solely from its transmission spectrum. We
find good agreement between the mass retrieved for the hot Jupiter HD189733b
from transmission spectroscopy with that from RV measurements. Our method will
be able to retrieve the masses of Earth-sized and super-Earth planets using
data from future space telescopes that were initially designed for atmospheric
characterization.Comment: 66 pages, 25 figures, published in the December 20, 2013 edition of
Science Magazine. Includes supplementary material
Converse bounds for private communication over quantum channels
This paper establishes several converse bounds on the private transmission
capabilities of a quantum channel. The main conceptual development builds
firmly on the notion of a private state, which is a powerful, uniquely quantum
method for simplifying the tripartite picture of privacy involving local
operations and public classical communication to a bipartite picture of quantum
privacy involving local operations and classical communication. This approach
has previously led to some of the strongest upper bounds on secret key rates,
including the squashed entanglement and the relative entropy of entanglement.
Here we use this approach along with a "privacy test" to establish a general
meta-converse bound for private communication, which has a number of
applications. The meta-converse allows for proving that any quantum channel's
relative entropy of entanglement is a strong converse rate for private
communication. For covariant channels, the meta-converse also leads to
second-order expansions of relative entropy of entanglement bounds for private
communication rates. For such channels, the bounds also apply to the private
communication setting in which the sender and receiver are assisted by
unlimited public classical communication, and as such, they are relevant for
establishing various converse bounds for quantum key distribution protocols
conducted over these channels. We find precise characterizations for several
channels of interest and apply the methods to establish several converse bounds
on the private transmission capabilities of all phase-insensitive bosonic
channels.Comment: v3: 53 pages, 3 figures, final version accepted for publication in
IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
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