Macroscopic Entanglement and Phase Transitions

This paper summarises the results of our research on macroscopic entanglement in spin systems and free Bosonic gases. We explain how entanglement can be observed using entanglement witnesses which are themselves constructed within the framework of thermodynamics and thus macroscopic observables. These thermodynamical entanglement witnesses result in bounds on macroscopic parameters of the system, such as the temperature, the energy or the susceptibility, below which entanglement must be present. The derived bounds indicate a relationship between the occurrence of entanglement and the establishment of order, possibly resulting in phase transition phenomena. We give a short overview over the concepts developed in condensed matter physics to capture the characteristics of phase transitions in particular in terms of order and correlation functions. Finally we want to ask and speculate whether entanglement could be a generalised order concept by itself, relevant in (quantum induced) phase transitions such as BEC, and that taking this view may help us to understand the underlying process of high-T superconductivity.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures (color), Submitted to special OSID issue, Proceedings of the 38th Symposium on Mathematical Physics - Quantum Entanglement & Geometry, Torun (Poland), June 200

Witnessed Entanglement

We present a new measure of entanglement for mixed states. It can be approximately computable for every state and can be used to quantify all different types of multipartite entanglement. We show that it satisfies the usual properties of a good entanglement quantifier and derive relations between it and other entanglement measures.Comment: Revised version. 7 pages and one figur

Entangled inputs cannot make imperfect quantum channels perfect

Entangled inputs can enhance the capacity of quantum channels, this being one of the consequences of the celebrated result showing the non-additivity of several quantities relevant for quantum information science. In this work, we answer the converse question (whether entangled inputs can ever render noisy quantum channels have maximum capacity) to the negative: No sophisticated entangled input of any quantum channel can ever enhance the capacity to the maximum possible value; a result that holds true for all channels both for the classical as well as the quantum capacity. This result can hence be seen as a bound as to how "non-additive quantum information can be". As a main result, we find first practical and remarkably simple computable single-shot bounds to capacities, related to entanglement measures. As examples, we discuss the qubit amplitude damping and identify the first meaningful bound for its classical capacity.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, an error in the argument on the quantum capacity corrected, version to be published in the Physical Review Letter

Quantum Many-Body Phenomena in Coupled Cavity Arrays

The increasing level of experimental control over atomic and optical systems gained in the past years have paved the way for the exploration of new physical regimes in quantum optics and atomic physics, characterised by the appearance of quantum many-body phenomena, originally encountered only in condensed-matter physics, and the possibility of experimentally accessing them in a more controlled manner. In this review article we survey recent theoretical studies concerning the use of cavity quantum electrodynamics to create quantum many-body systems. Based on recent experimental progress in the fabrication of arrays of interacting micro-cavities and on their coupling to atomic-like structures in several different physical architectures, we review proposals on the realisation of paradigmatic many-body models in such systems, such as the Bose-Hubbard and the anisotropic Heisenberg models. Such arrays of coupled cavities offer interesting properties as simulators of quantum many-body physics, including the full addressability of individual sites and the accessibility of inhomogeneous models

Quantifying Quantum Correlations in Fermionic Systems using Witness Operators

We present a method to quantify quantum correlations in arbitrary systems of indistinguishable fermions using witness operators. The method associates the problem of finding the optimal entan- glement witness of a state with a class of problems known as semidefinite programs (SDPs), which can be solved efficiently with arbitrary accuracy. Based on these optimal witnesses, we introduce a measure of quantum correlations which has an interpretation analogous to the Generalized Robust- ness of entanglement. We also extend the notion of quantum discord to the case of indistinguishable fermions, and propose a geometric quantifier, which is compared to our entanglement measure. Our numerical results show a remarkable equivalence between the proposed Generalized Robustness and the Schliemann concurrence, which are equal for pure states. For mixed states, the Schliemann con- currence presents itself as an upper bound for the Generalized Robustness. The quantum discord is also found to be an upper bound for the entanglement.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for publication in Quantum Information Processin

Brewing fermentations more profitable

High gravity brewing has been presented as an alternative to make beer more profitable. The fermentation of high concentrated wort normally stops prematurely due the high stress conditions imposed by osmotic pressure and high ethanol content. In this wort, initial oxygen content and yeast preconditioning were applied and compared when used to accelerate very high gravity (VHG) fermentations. This work showed that using pure oxygen instead of air, the fermentation time can be reduced in about 24h without changes in the higher alcohols and esters production profile. When the yeast is preconditioned with a mixture of unsaturated fatty acids and salts before pitching the wort, the fermentation batch can be reduced from 7 to 5 days achieving lower residual extract. This difference in the residual extract results in a beer with 1 % more ethanol, which corresponds to an increase of 18% in the productivity.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Schmidt balls around the identity

Robustness measures as introduced by Vidal and Tarrach [PRA, 59, 141-155] quantify the extent to which entangled states remain entangled under mixing. Analogously, we introduce here the Schmidt robustness and the random Schmidt robustness. The latter notion is closely related to the construction of Schmidt balls around the identity. We analyse the situation for pure states and provide non-trivial upper and lower bounds. Upper bounds to the random Schmidt-2 robustness allow us to construct a particularly simple distillability criterion. We present two conjectures, the first one is related to the radius of inner balls around the identity in the convex set of Schmidt number n-states. We also conjecture a class of optimal Schmidt witnesses for pure states.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur