Quantum Computing, Metrology, and Imaging

Information science is entering into a new era in which certain subtleties of quantum mechanics enables large enhancements in computational efficiency and communication security. Naturally, precise control of quantum systems required for the implementation of quantum information processing protocols implies potential breakthoughs in other sciences and technologies. We discuss recent developments in quantum control in optical systems and their applications in metrology and imaging.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures; Proceedings of SPIE: Fluctuations and Noise in Photonics and Quantum Optics III (2005

Notes on the Shanghai Expo

1. One of my Chinese classmates mentioned that what really mattered for Chinese visitors were the big exhibitions: Japan, China, Europe, and the US. While still interested in the big exhibits, most Westerners were also astounded by the fact that North Korea and Iran were among the countries with pavilions at the Expo. The pavilions, although far from spectacular, showed a side of the “rogue” nations that is impossible to see in Western media, which often focuses on the proliferation of nuclear weapons and anti-US sentiment. The North Korean Pavilion showed video clips of the Mass Games and random shots of people working in factories and walking through a college campus. You could even buy North Korean stamps and memorabilia. On a light note, one of my friends bought an Expo passport (a small booklet where you get stamps verifying that you did, indeed, go to certain exhibits). She was denied a stamp at the South Korean Pavilion because of her previous visit to the North Korean exhibit

Alternate Scheme for Optical Cluster-State Generation without Number-Resolving Photon Detectors

We design a controlled-phase gate for linear optical quantum computing by using photodetectors that cannot resolve photon number. An intrinsic error-correction circuit corrects errors introduced by the detectors. Our controlled-phase gate has a 1/4 success probability. Recent development in cluster-state quantum computing has shown that a two-qubit gate with non-zero success probability can build an arbitrarily large cluster state with only polynomial overhead. Hence, it is possible to generate optical cluster states without number-resolving detectors and with polynomial overhead.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables; made significant revisions and changed forma

Super-Resolving Quantum Radar: Coherent-State Sources with Homodyne Detection Suffice to Beat the Diffraction Limit

There has been much recent interest in quantum metrology for applications to sub-Raleigh ranging and remote sensing such as in quantum radar. For quantum radar, atmospheric absorption and diffraction rapidly degrades any actively transmitted quantum states of light, such as N00N states, so that for this high-loss regime the optimal strategy is to transmit coherent states of light, which suffer no worse loss than the linear Beer's law for classical radar attenuation, and which provide sensitivity at the shot-noise limit in the returned power. We show that coherent radar radiation sources, coupled with a quantum homodyne detection scheme, provide both longitudinal and angular super-resolution much below the Rayleigh diffraction limit, with sensitivity at shot-noise in terms of the detected photon power. Our approach provides a template for the development of a complete super-resolving quantum radar system with currently available technology.Comment: 23 pages, content is identical to published versio

Inefficiency of classically simulating linear optical quantum computing with Fock-state inputs

Aaronson and Arkhipov recently used computational complexity theory to argue that classical computers very likely cannot efficiently simulate linear, multimode, quantum-optical interferometers with arbitrary Fock-state inputs [Aaronson and Arkhipov, Theory Comput. 9, 143 (2013)]. Here we present an elementary argument that utilizes only techniques from quantum optics. We explicitly construct the Hilbert space for such an interferometer and show that its dimension scales exponentially with all the physical resources. We also show in a simple example just how the Schr\"odinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum theory, while mathematically equivalent, are not in general computationally equivalent. Finally, we conclude our argument by comparing the symmetry requirements of multiparticle bosonic to fermionic interferometers and, using simple physical reasoning, connect the nonsimulatability of the bosonic device to the complexity of computing the permanent of a large matrix.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure Published in PRA Phys. Rev. A 89, 022328 (2014

An All Linear Optical Quantum Memory Based on Quantum Error Correction

When photons are sent through a fiber as part of a quantum communication protocol, the error that is most difficult to correct is photon loss. Here, we propose and analyze a two-to-four qubit encoding scheme, which can recover the loss of one qubit in the transmission. This device acts as a repeater when it is placed in series to cover a distance larger than the attenuation length of the fiber, and it acts as an optical quantum memory when it is inserted in a fiber loop. We call this dual-purpose device a ``quantum transponder.''Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Temperature-Dependent Electron-Electron Interaction in Graphene on SrTiO3

The electron band structure of graphene on SrTiO3 substrate has been investigated as a function of temperature. The high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission study reveals that the spectral width at Fermi energy and the Fermi velocity of graphene on SrTiO3 are comparable to those of graphene on a BN substrate. Near the charge neutrality, the energy-momentum dispersion of graphene exhibits a strong deviation from the well-known linearity, which is magnified as temperature decreases. Such modification resembles the characteristics of enhanced electron-electron interaction. Our results not only suggest that SrTiO3 can be a plausible candidate as a substrate material for applications in graphene-based electronics, but also provide a possible route towards the realization of a new type of strongly correlated electron phases in the prototypical two-dimensional system via the manipulation of temperature and a proper choice of dielectric substrates.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

High-fidelity linear optical quantum computing with polarization encoding

We show that the KLM scheme [Knill, Laflamme and Milburn, Nature {\bf 409}, 46] can be implemented using polarization encoding, thus reducing the number of path modes required by half. One of the main advantages of this new implementation is that it naturally incorporates a loss detection mechanism that makes the probability of a gate introducing a non-detected error, when non-ideal detectors are considered, dependent only on the detector dark-count rate and independent of its efficiency. Since very low dark-count rate detectors are currently available, a high-fidelity gate (probability of error of order $10^{-6}$ conditional on the gate being successful) can be implemented using polarization encoding. The detector efficiency determines the overall success probability of the gate but does not affect its fidelity. This can be applied to the efficient construction of optical cluster states with very high fidelity for quantum computing.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Improved construction of high-fidelity entangled ancilla; references adde