Role of thermal noise in tripartite quantum steering

The influence of thermal noise on bipartite and tripartite quantum steering induced by a short laser pulse in a hybrid three-mode optomechanical system is investigated. The calculation is carried out under the bad cavity limit, the adiabatic approximation of a slowly varying amplitude of the cavity mode, and with the assumption of driving the cavity mode with a blue detuned strong laser pulse. Under such conditions, explicit expressions of the bipartite and tripartite steering parameters are obtained, and the concept of collective tripartite quantum steering, recently introduced by He and Reid [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 250403 (2013)], is clearly explored. It is found that both bipartite and tripartite steering parameters are sensitive functions of the initial state of the modes and distinctly different steering behaviour could be observed depending on whether the modes were initially in a thermal state or not. We find that the initial thermal noise is more effective in destroying the bipartite rather than the tripartite steering which, on the other hand, can persist even for a large thermal noise. For the initial vacuum state of a steered mode, the tripartite steering exists over the entire interaction time even if the steering modes are in very noisy thermal states. When the steered mode is initially in a thermal state, it can be collectively steered by the other modes. There are thresholds for the average number of the thermal photons above which the existing tripartite steering appears as the collective steering. Finally, we point out that the collective steering may provide a resource in a hybrid quantum network for quantum secret sharing protocol.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Engineering asymmetric steady-state Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering in macroscopic hybrid systems

Generation of quantum correlations between separate objects is of significance both in fundamental physics and in quantum networks. One important challenge is to create the directional "spooky action-at-a-distanc" effects that Schr\"{o}dinger called "steering" between two macroscopic and massive objects. Here, we analyze a generic scheme for generating steering correlations in cascaded hybrid systems in which two distant oscillators with effective masses of opposite signs are coupled to a unidirectional light field, a setup which is known to build up quantum correlations by means of quantum back-action evasion. The unidirectional coupling of the first to the second oscillator via the light field can be engineered to enhance steering in both directions and provides an active method for controlling the asymmetry of steering. We show that the resulting scheme can efficiently generate unconditional steady-state Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering between the two subsystems, even in the presence of thermal noise and optical losses. As a scenario of particular technological interest in quantum networks, we use our scheme to engineer enhanced steering from an untrusted node with limited tunability (in terms of interaction strength and type with the light field) to a trusted, highly tunable node, hence offering a path to implementing one-sided device-independent quantum tasks.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Number-phase entanglement and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering

We use the uncertainty relation between the operators associated to the total number of particles and to the relative phase of two bosonic modes to construct entanglement and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering criteria. These can be tested experimentally in a variety of systems, such as optical fields, Bose-Einstein condensates or mechanical oscillators. While known entanglement criteria involving the phase observable typically require to perform interference measurements by recombining the two systems, our criteria can be tested through local measurements at two spatially distinct positions, to investigate the nonlocal nature of quantum correlations. We present simple examples where our criteria are violated, and show their robustness to noise. Apart from being useful for state characterization, they might find application in quantum information protocols, for example based on number-phase teleportation.Comment: Comments are welcome

Quantum Noise of Kramers-Kronig Receiver

Abstrac--Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver, which is equivalent to heterodyne detection with one single photodetector, provides an efficient method to reconstruct the complex-valued optical field by means of intensity detection given a minimum-phase signal. In this paper, quantum noise of the KK receiver is derived analytically and compared with that of the balanced heterodyne detection. We show that the quantum noise of the KK receiver keeps the radical fluctuation of the measured signal the same as that of the balanced heterodyne detection, while compressing the tangential noise to 1/3 times the radical one using the information provided by the Hilbert transform. In consequence, the KK receiver has 3/2 times the signal-to-noise ratio of balanced heterodyne detection while presenting an asymmetric distribution of fluctuations, which is also different from that of the latter. More interestingly, the projected in-phase and quadrature field operators of the retrieved signal after down conversion have a time dependent quantum noise distribution depending on the time-varying phase. This property provides a feasible scheme for controlling the fluctuation distribution according to the requirements of measurement accuracy in the specific direction. Under the condition of strong carrier wave, the fluctuations of the component requiring to be measured more accurately can be compressed to 1 / 6, which is even lower than 1/4 by measuring a coherent state. Finally, we prove the analytic conclusions by simulation results

Unconditional steady-state entanglement in macroscopic hybrid systems by coherent noise cancellation

The generation of entanglement between disparate physical objects is a key ingredient in the field of quantum technologies, since they can have different functionalities in a quantum network. Here we propose and analyze a generic approach to steady-state entanglement generation between two oscillators with different temperatures and decoherence properties coupled in cascade to a common unidirectional light field. The scheme is based on a combination of coherent noise cancellation and dynamical cooling techniques for two oscillators with effective masses of opposite signs, such as quasi-spin and motional degrees of freedom, respectively. The interference effect provided by the cascaded setup can be tuned to implement additional noise cancellation leading to improved entanglement even in the presence of a hot thermal environment. The unconditional entanglement generation is advantageous since it provides a ready-to-use quantum resource. Remarkably, by comparing to the conditional entanglement achievable in the dynamically stable regime, we find our unconditional scheme to deliver a virtually identical performance when operated optimally.Comment: Final version; 6 pages, 3 figures + Supplemental Materia

Generating optical cat states via quantum interference of multi-path free-electron-photons interactions

The novel quantum effects induced by the free-electron-photons interaction have attracted increasing interest due to their potential applications in ultrafast quantum information processing. Here, we propose a scheme to generate optical cat states based on the quantum interference of multi-path free-electron-photons interactions that take place simultaneously with strong coupling strength. By performing a projection measurement on the electron, the state of light changes significantly from a coherent state into a non-Gaussian state with either Wigner negativity or squeezing property, both possess metrological power to achieve quantum advantage. More importantly, we show that the Wigner negativity oscillates with the coupling strength, and the optical cat states are successfully generated with high fidelity at all the oscillation peaks. This oscillation reveals the quantum interference effect of the multiple quantum pathways in the interaction of the electron with photons, by that various nonclassical states of light are promising to be fast prepared and manipulated. These findings inspire further exploration of emergent quantum phenomena and advanced quantum technologies with free electrons

Auditory Attention Decoding with Task-Related Multi-View Contrastive Learning

The human brain can easily focus on one speaker and suppress others in scenarios such as a cocktail party. Recently, researchers found that auditory attention can be decoded from the electroencephalogram (EEG) data. However, most existing deep learning methods are difficult to use prior knowledge of different views (that is attended speech and EEG are task-related views) and extract an unsatisfactory representation. Inspired by Broadbent's filter model, we decode auditory attention in a multi-view paradigm and extract the most relevant and important information utilizing the missing view. Specifically, we propose an auditory attention decoding (AAD) method based on multi-view VAE with task-related multi-view contrastive (TMC) learning. Employing TMC learning in multi-view VAE can utilize the missing view to accumulate prior knowledge of different views into the fusion of representation, and extract the approximate task-related representation. We examine our method on two popular AAD datasets, and demonstrate the superiority of our method by comparing it to the state-of-the-art method